Foreign titles in Turkish small caps

Adam Jagosz

This is a useless one, here it goes:

How to set a foreign quote within Turkish text in small caps: Turkish dotted/dotless i scheme, or the foreign language's scheme?

I.e.,

or

I am mildly aware I might be alone in asking myself this question. Also, not sure if this thread qualifies to the category I picked, which might mean it is not suitable for TypeDrawers... but you guys are the only folks I know that might be remotely interested in this, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

John Savard

I would advise to do so in the scheme of the foreign language. (To remove ambiguity, I mean the language foreign to Turkish.)

However, this depends on the sophistication of the intended audience. If the title of a movie is in the Turkish language, and it is being advertised in the United States, if it is also a Turkish-language movie, and particularly if it is without subtitles, the individuals to whom the movie is being advertised will clearly be people aware of the existence of the Turkish language.

Otherwise, usually movies from other countries will have English-language titles for their American release.

Theunis de Jong

You would not add the dot to a capitalized /i, much as you would not remove it when typing the same title in lowercase.

When to use dotted and dotless /i in Turkish is governed by pronounciation, but I guess your average Turkish viewer will know how to pronounce "The Amazıng Spıderman" correctly anyway. For comparison, Dutch pronounciation rules are also different from English but I cannot imagine seeing an English title 'transliterated' to cater for this.

It's something else when the entire title gets translated. "İNANAN" would be fine. (Disclaimer: Google translationese.)

If you want to make sure the English title gets "seen" as a foreign language, add quotes around it.

ibrahim kactioglu

Actually this is an extremely complicated thread, even among the native Turkish speakers. According to some of the Turkish linguistic scientists, poets, and writers you have to write the pronunciation of the quote. Because Turkish is pronounced as written.
For instance: "DI BİLİVIR" FİLMİ İLE BAĞIMSIZ

It seems inappropriate when you are writing a foreign quote which is written in Latin Alphabet. But if the quote is written in non-Latin Alphabet this approach makes sense.

Currently, most of us (Turkish native speakers) should write the quote as:
THE BELIEVER FİLMİ İLE BAĞIMSIZ RUH and find it appropriate.
When it is about to quote non-Latin text we would write its English version.

For instance: PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
(other approach: PİYOTR İLYİÇ ÇAYKOVSKİ)

Adam Jagosz

It is kind of obvious that capitalized foreign title shouldn't get the tittle. What I had in mind was automatic case conversion and/or OpenType small caps feature with the text tagged Turkish. So from what I gather, ideally the typesetter should tag the quoted title with its repsective language to get rid of the extra dot?

Maybe the sample (which is all-small-caps, my bad) led some of you to skip reading the title of the thread.

@John Savard Thanks, that was my guess.

@ibrahim kac That's interesting, AFAIK Russian (and probably some other Slavic languages, too, Polish excluded) does this, e.g. for Latin names, right? Convention.

@Theunis de Jong The original text (Wikipedia) probably had it in italics, which I didn't design, so I opted for color (the images are from/for my type posters).

John Savard

ibrahim kac said:

For instance: PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
(other approach: PİYOTR İLYİÇ ÇAYKOVSKİ)

That's interesting. I would have thought that in Turkish, there would have been exactly two choices, and one of them would indeed be

PİYOTR İLYİÇ ÇAYKOVSKİ

but the other one would be

ПЁТР ИЛЬИЧ ЧАЙКОВСКИЙ

since if one was going to use a Latin transliteration other than the Turkish one, why not use the French transliteration, or the German?

ibrahim kactioglu

John Savard said:

ibrahim kac said:

For instance: PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
(other approach: PİYOTR İLYİÇ ÇAYKOVSKİ)

That's interesting. I would have thought that in Turkish, there would have been exactly two choices, and one of them would indeed be

PİYOTR İLYİÇ ÇAYKOVSKİ

but the other one would be

ПЁТР ИЛЬИЧ ЧАЙКОВСКИЙ

since if one was going to use a Latin transliteration other than the Turkish one, why not use the French transliteration, or the German?

I have never seen usage of the second choice, maybe there are few examples.

In my opinion, it is about the invasion of the English/American Culture. Of course if the original quote is French or German we would write as original (mostly). Also during the Ottoman Empire period French culture was extremely predominant. I think there were the same problems at this period though we were using Arabic alphabet.