I had a similar issue with this author: Stanislas Lem
It's the French name for Stanisław Lem, so I changed the author of the books with the French name and put a remark in the description of the French profile in case other French editions come up.

Let me know if I should have done overwise.

Yes.

I'm not clear on what the consensus is...

do I merge this author
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/114...
with
Mario Vargas Llosa

Yup. ^^ Probably easier for mangaka than other cases, though if J.D. Robb ends up having 'robo' in Katakana, something is probably wrong..XD

jenn, that's what I do for manga authors as well, plus a note in the English and Japanese profiles pointing to each other.

At the moment (for Japanese manga), I've been using the English version as the main one (since German and French versions tend to use the English name as well) -- so change the Japanese to English, merge, then change back to Japanese.. is that okay?

Since I have trouble searching for the author I was working on (樋口 橘) now, even though the listings look fine, I'm not sure whether that works good. Works for Death Note's OHBA Tsugumi (大場 つぐみ), though. XD Oh wait...hayy, Higuchi-sensei's Japanese name works now. Maybe it took a day to refresh the listings, heh.

I'd actually prefer to change the name (merge them),but this one doesn't need an aka,it isn't translated he is Persian & he has got no other profile.

My vote would be to stick to the Anglicized version of the author's name. I think that works best where the bulk of the database is already in English.

Cait wrote: "Any chance we could come up with a standard?"

1) Most of the other-language librarians don't read here. Not regularly, at least.

2) Given that the aka feature will make it moot, why go nuts now?

Any chance we could come up with a standard? (Other than the usual "whyyyyyyyy isn't the aka feature ready yet?" :) )

I agree with rivka

We don't have an established rule on how these are to be dealt with.

This is incorrect, isn't it? Without an AKA there's no good way to handle this, but I thought that notes in the author bio were the preferred method, not changing the author name.