Talk:Abe no Nakamaro's letters to Li Bai

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Formatting questions

Following up on Darman's formatting edits yesterday, it appears that there are some questions about formatting that we haven't reached a consensus on in our wiki. Here are some areas:

• Italicization: Darman pointed out that we italicize all the text in "Eivor's letters", and we also do so for "Egyptian notes", but I was basing the formatting off of "War Letters" and "Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad's Codex so clearly there is an inconsistency there. Although I usually like italicization for transcribing text from letters, there is the presence of one or more poems in the letters, and I think it looks cleaner for the poems to be in italics instead, which may not be done if we italicize the rest of the text by default.
• Table organization: I am not sure if condensing all the letters into one table with tabs and the pages of each letter nested within that would be more accessible than separating each letter into their own section. I might add that initially, I had considered providing Tokyopop's translation for each letter in a different tab as well, alongside the original Chinese text. There would then be a place where the contents of the letter in both Chinese and in translated English forms can be conveniently compared. Non-Chinese readers could ignore the Chinese text but for readers of Chinese, there would be an added value to the page since they can easily verify the content of the letters. However, I have since changed my mind about giving the Tokyopop translations. As you guys know, there are always substantial errors in Tokyopop's translationns, which originally I thought I could just give footnotes to correct, but I have also noticed on re-reading their version of the first letter that they are so deliberately loose with the translation, in some places it's almost like they decided to just entirely paraphrase rather than translate. So I am not sure if there is value to providing Tokyopop's translation at all.
• "Conjectural name": I found adding a notice that the title of this article is "conjecture" to be quite awkward, and I don't know how quite to explain it. The best example I can give is that we are later going to create an article compiling all of Li Bai's poems which have featured in the manhua. When we make this article, it would just be titled "[Li Bai's poems]". To put up a notice that such an article's title is "conjecture" would be very weird to me and even wrong. Titling a page compiling all of the Li Bai's poems by describing precisely what it is is not really conjecture... normally the "conjectural title" is meant to inform readers that the name is only a placeholder for lack of a canonically verified name and may not be correct. But the case with Li Bai's poems and Abe no Nakamaro's letters is different in my opinion. It's not a matter of not knowing a "canonical name" for the item. The pages themselves are our original documentation of all the poems or letters together. I don't know if the same can be said of "Egyptian notes" though since we are struggling to come up with a proper title for that page.

Resolving the formatting questions for this page may set a precedent since it has called to attention that we apparently have not established a conventional standard for these pages yet. Please let me know what you guys think about each of these three points or any other areas of formatting I have not covered. Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 20:03, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

Since I was the one who prompted this discussion, I'll add my response (meant to before but was finishing up The Twelve Trails page). My thinking for italicizing Nakamaro's letters was as though they were found "in-game" like for the Dialogue parts of all memories. But I can also see where the usual application of italics would apply, where an author directly quotes another in their work and italicizes to emphasize to readers the different voices and/or specific words. If the letters were italics but the poems were not, it could look weird.

As for the table, I actually like the idea of having a letter in one tab, with your translation of its pages and the original Chinese in single sub-tabs. It'll be long, but it's been done before, like with Noob's and Numbskull's Abstergo manuals. For whatever reason, Tokyopop has played incredibly loosely with the English, so I also feel that comparing your work to the original text would help keep the flow, idioms, etc that Tokyopop's work lacks.

I'll admit I jumped the gun on the Conjectural name, thinking it was a placeholder like other things that appear but are not officially named, but I should have considered that of course works like Li Bai's poems would have been actually recorded. – Darman (talk) 14:55, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

I cast my votes thus: No italics for the entire text and One tabber rather than separated. - Soranin (talk) 13:47, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

If we do have one tab per letter, can we still do the table(s) as Sol suggested? I was thinking something like this:

Letter 1Letter 2

Sol's work	Tokyopop	Chinese
"Talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing..." etc. translation	Crap translation	Original text

etc.

Or would it be too messy given how insanely long Nakamaro's writings clearly are? – Darman (talk) 00:05, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Just to bump this, how do we want to go about it? I don't think we ever agreed. – Darman (talk) 19:20, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

We're not doing this, sorry. Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 09:52, 23 June 2024 (UTC)