I’ve been trying to update a lot of these old Chinese shellacs from China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan (among other places) for various reasons, like the artists not being there, or the release being in simplified Chinese when it should be in traditional Chinese.
The format on the older shellacs baffle me to the point that I am pretty sure I’m entering a lot of the information on these incorrectly. I would like help on reading some of these if possible.
For starters, I know how some of the formatting on these work. I know a lot of them are read right to left, instead of left to right. If it’s an older shellac, typically the dialect is displayed in the first line. Also, the title tends to be either immediately before or after the artist(s), and releases that take up several shellacs have text at the bottom that indicates what part it is.
The ones I am more concerned about entering wrong are the opera ones, particularly the artists and titles. The more recent shellacs have only a few lines of text that say the song title, the artist and maybe the dialect. But some of the really old opera shellacs from the 1900’s to the 1930’s list artists and, I assume, the roles they play, like 花旦, and also have additional text on it that I find confusing.
Here are some examples of the more contemporary shellacs that I refer to: 唐伯虎點秋香.
Here are examples of the kinds of shellacs I need help with: 煤山淚史.
I completed the very last one, scarcesounds ed so many shellacs while not actually owning them? Or at least he should high-resolution images. I can't even confirm it has 2 shellacs.
It definitely sucks for sure! I agree that a lot of images are impossible to OCR. I’ve used Translate and a lot of the time I have to use QHanzi to even try to get those characters.
