Roon transliterates Western artists when adding CJK languages (ref#AJ8BUI)

Hi! What’s not quite right with Roon?

· None of the above quite fits

None of the above quite fits

· App interface looks or behaves oddly

Tell us what's going on

· When a non-Latin language (e.g., Traditional Chinese or Japanese) is added to the "Languages for artist and album names" (Fluency) priority list, Roon aggressively translates global Western artists (e.g., Andrea Bocelli) into that language based on cloud metadata. This occurs even when the goal of enabling the language is solely to display native CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) artists in their original scripts, not to transliterate Latin-script artists.

Currently, Fluency lacks a "Keep Native Script" rule, forcing an all-or-nothing translation behavior that corrupts the display of Western artist names.

Steps to Reproduce:

Navigate to Settings > General > Languages for artist and album names.

Add English, Chinese (Traditional), and Japanese to the active language list.

Search for or navigate to a globally recognized Western artist in your library (e.g., Andrea Bocelli).

Observe the primary artist name and album metadata.

Expected Behavior:
Roon should respect the native script of the artist's origin.

Native Japanese artists (e.g., 坂本龍一) should display in Kanji/Kana.

Native Chinese artists (e.g., 周杰倫) should display in Hanzi.

Native Western/Latin artists (e.g., Andrea Bocelli) should remain in their original Latin/English text, rather than being transliterated into Chinese characters (e.g., 安德烈·波伽利).

Actual Behavior:
Because a localized Chinese or Japanese cloud metadata string exists for the Western artist, Roon forces the translated alias (e.g., 安德烈·波伽利) as the primary display name, treating Fluency as a blanket translation tool rather than a native-script enabler. The only current workaround is to either manually lock individual artists to English or completely remove CJK languages from the Fluency list, which breaks the display for native Asian artists.

Impact:
Users with multilingual libraries cannot cleanly display native metadata. Enabling Asian languages to properly view Asian music inadvertently overwrites the original names of Western artists, creating a frustrating, mixed-language library experience.

Tell us about your home network

· The issue has nothing to do with my network.

Hi @PoloJCP,

Thanks for the clear write-up.

The language priority list tells Roon which artist/album title languages are acceptable, but it doesn’t consider the artist’s own origin distribution language. Once CJK is in the list, those aliases become valid for any artist that has a string available.

One question first: is English above Chinese (Traditional) and Japanese in your list? If so, and you’re still seeing the Chinese alias, that’s a separate problem we’ll need to ticket.

Otherwise, script-aware name selection is a real gap, but it’s technically a feature request at this time.

We’ll watch for your confirmation and proceed from there.

Thank you!

Hi Connor,

Yes, the order of the language is:

English

Traditional Chinese

Japanese

That is why I suspect there is a bug, and I think this may be a regression introduced with one of the recent update, I always had this setting and it was behaving correctly in the past.

Thanks!

Hi Connor, I wanted to see if you had more idea of this is actually a bug or working as intended? Thanks!

Hi Connor, not should if you a chance to see my reply on the thread, the setting was indeed in the following order:
English
Traditional Chinese
Japanese

So I think there may be a bug on how the feature is suppose to behave. Thanks!

Hello @PoloJCP

We’ve discussed this with our senior QA and development teams. The team is investigating some possibilities here and, as soon as that investigation is complete, we’ll be sure to follow up ASAP.

You have our apologies for the trouble here, and we’ve greatly appreciated your patience as we continue investigating this tricky issue. We’ll be in touch as soon as we can.

Hey @PoloJCP,

I wanted to touch base on this, this ticket is still in progress, and we appreciate your patience while further investigations are underway.

Thank you for the update, appreciate it!