How should hyphenated Chinese and Korean names be capitalised?

@Bethanny​ Any update on this? In case it’s any help, for examples of how other sites deal with this:

English Wikipedia’s rules are that Chinese personal names with official romanisations derived from Pinyin are written as single words by default (with an apostrophe between the syllables if the second one starts with a vowel), while “When using Wade–Giles, a hyphen should be put between the two syllables of a given name, and the second syllable should not be capitalised (for example, Lee Teng-hui, not Lee Teng-Hui). Hong Kong names should also follow the hyphenated style.”

For Korean names, its default is that “If there is no personal preference, and no established English spelling, hyphenate the syllables, with only the first syllable capitalized (e.g., Hong Gil-dong).”

The Movie Database (TMDB) rules that, for all East Asian Names, “Hyphenated names should be capitalized as one single name, without a capital letter after the hyphen e.g. Song Kang-ho.”

HanCinema appears to write any Korean personal name that is conventionally divided in some way with a hyphen between the syllables and the second syllable not capitalised.

The Golden Horse Awards appear to strictly write Chinese personal names either with no division or with hyphens between the syllables, not spaces, and the second syllable is never capitalised.

In contrast, MyDramaList (MDL), as I’ve found out from admins when trying to edit things on it, defaults for all Chinese and Korean names to putting spaces between all syllables and disallows hyphens in them, for names of both real people and characters. Its guidelines only vaguely refer to this but do mention “Most of the character names on the website do not have a dash (-) between their first name [I think they mean a hyphen–minus, as that’s what the character in parentheses is], so please replace it with space.” and that “We will still keep the space between syllables in the case of Chinese and Korean names” of actors and crew members.

Hong Kong Cinémagic appears to mostly use spaces between syllables.

The Criterion Collection uses hyphens, with the second syllable not capitalised, on its pages about The Housemaid, Last Hurrah for Chivalry, The Killer, Hard Boiled and Secret Sunshine, but spaces on those about the World of Wong Kar Wai collection, Memories of Murder and Okja. So it’s not consistent even for all Hong Kong or all Korean movies. The page for Parasite uses one format for real people’s names and the other for character names.

So, all these other sites, individual pages or sections on them tend to go for either hyphens or spaces (whether as a default to fall back on or a hard rule). But whenever they go for hyphens, they also go for the second syllable being all in lower case. That is, either Chow Yun-fat or Chow Yun Fat, but never Chow Yun-Fat (as the name is on IMDb).

@English_pedantic_grammarian​ Hi!

Our policy team has confirmed that names should be capitalized and hyphenated like our examples show.

Cheers!

Well, then the guidelines should be amended.

@jeorj_euler​ They will be :)

@Bethanny​ Do you mean like the “Yun-Fat” example (with a hyphen and the second syllable capitalised)?

That’s unusual (different from Wikipedia, TMDB, Criterion and what awards and festivals tend to do), but it is what AsianWiki uses. I’d be glad to have consistency either way.

Thank you for following up on this and not abandoning it, even if it took a long time.

The lowercase form makes more sense, given the semantics or lack thereof for the constituent parts of these kinds of names. Basically each part is the a Romanization of the pronunciation of a distinct glyph, and doesn't necessarily represent a name (or a even word) in and of itself.