Talk:Fräulein (1958 film)

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"Fräulein" mit Umlaut?

Seriously? A 1958 US film has an umlaut in its title?
This is way before the heavy metal umlaut.
Making a German character sympathetic in 1958 should involve eliminating Nazi-esque touches like umlauts.
The IMDb lists plain "Fraulein" as a title, matching the poster, and also the novel.
So this umlaut is really, really there on release prints?
Varlaam (talk) 17:51, 22 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ya, ya, out mit the umlaut (although I hardly associate it with the Nazis). The New York Times review doesn't have it either. Clarityfiend (talk) 21:40, 22 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Damn, I may have acted too quickly. IMDb does have the umlaut (are your pants on fire, Varlaam?), as does TCM, though not AllRovi. WP:DIACRITICS says in this divided case, either is acceptable, so no great harm has been done. Clarityfiend (talk) 21:53, 22 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I did say the IMDb lists it as "a" title, not as "the only" title.

Remembering the 1960s, I think we said Frau and Fraulein then, both as "frow".

The German pronunciation with "froy", I think that was rare in English then, and the use of an umlaut was odd.

In English, 1950s and 1960s, you can't produce it on a typewriter and no one knows how to say it.

Speaking as a former IMDb researcher, a decade ago, I can say it was hard(er) to do accented letters; the IMDb had accents missing everywhere; there were nationalistic battles to impose accents on people like Cesar Romero. In that context, someone could easily have seen "Fraulein" as an error, simply caused by an inability to input the umlaut, and corrected the "obvious error".

The IMDb might be showing an old, good faith, error.

In those days, I was in favour of better recordkeeping and sourcing, and while the IMDb adopted some of my innovations, they didn't do anything about that.

The IMDb only fairly recently started supporting detail in their Movie References section for verifiability, and they set up a crude solution, not the elegant one I described to the managers a dozen years ago.

Oh well.

But once you accumulate a legacy of flawed data, it's hard to impose a new standard that renders existing data invalid.

Design it thoughtfully, then implement the right solution the first time. Varlaam (talk) 02:47, 23 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]