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topic: Book Issues > Authors needing help from foreign-language speakers

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message 1: by rivka
05/13/2008 01:54AM

171430 Irving Wallace could use attention from German, Spanish, and French speakers.

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message 2: by Hope (last edited 05/13/2008 10:38AM)
05/13/2008 10:37AM

596438 Charlotte Macleod - http://www.goodreads.com/autho... could use at least a German speaker.

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message 3: by Lasairfiona
05/13/2008 06:44PM

284562 Re: Irving Wallace

Wiki got most of the translations for me. I can't figure out four of them:

A Sala Vip - Brazilian Edition (portuguese obviously)
L'Ospite Di Riguardo (worldcat says italian)
Palais Rose (worldcat says german but it isn't on the german wiki)
Premio Nobel, El (spanish and on the spanish page but I can't figure out which book it would be. It translated to The Nobel Prize.)
Rowohlts indiskrete Liste (worldcat says german too but not on the german wiki either).
ps - nothing seemed to be french.

Yay wiki! Because I don't speak a lick of any of those languages. I don't know if it would have helped to peak them as the translation were not always direct.

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message 4: by Lasairfiona (last edited 05/13/2008 09:23PM)
05/13/2008 09:22PM

284562 I got about half of the german books by Charlotte Macleod. One of them (Ein Glas voll Mord) has a translation on wiki (A pint of murder) but no english version on goodreads. The other ones were not on wiki and were more numerous than my last set so I am not going to list them.

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message 5: by Edifanob
05/14/2008 05:48AM

1120366 Hello,

I'm a native German speaker and also member of Goodreads Librarians.

I read all messages concerning Authors needing help from foreign-language.

To be honest, I do not understand which kind of help you need.

Would you be so kind as to explain to me what you expect?



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message 6: by Lisa (last edited 05/14/2008 05:57AM)
05/14/2008 05:56AM

83445 Hi Edifanob,

GR needs help combining books. Do you know how to combine books?

In a book's page on the right side, there's an option to "combine edtions." When you click that, that author's books all show up in a list, with each book having a box that can be checked.

We combine (check the boxes) of all editions of a book, including foreign language editions.

If you see a book, both the German and English editions of it, you'd check the boxes of each (one book at a time) and then all those editions of that book would combine when you click the combine editions button.

So, whether a GR member read it in English or German, they'd both show as having read it, and they could compare that book with one another.

If you need any further explanation, please post again.

A lot of us are combining books, but for those of us who don't speak a particular language, unless we are absolutely certain it's the same book, we don't combine the foreign language editions with the English language editions. So people who speak various languages can be very helpful with this task.

Thank you!

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message 7: by Kristen
05/14/2008 06:06AM

384163 One thing that frequently works for translations : Google the title and author. Find a vendor site on your results list that has a 'translate' tag. You'll get the plot description and names of main characters in English. Then re-Google for the characters names (or plot points, setting, etc.) and the author and it will pull up the English-language title.

I try Worldcat first, of course, because it's much faster. But this is a handy, albeit time-consuming alternative.

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message 8: by rivka
05/14/2008 07:33AM

171430 Kristen, that technique doesn't work as well for trying to distinguish individual volumes of a series. ;) It is pretty useful otherwise, though!

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message 9: by Edifanob
05/15/2008 02:33AM

1120366 Hi Lisa,

thank you very much for explanation.

So far I only posted books to be combined.

But I would like to learn in order to improve quality of Goodreads which is to be honest on a high level.

Am I authorized to combine books?

May I ask you to be your apprentice?
Give me a task. I try to execute and you control the result. In case I have second thoughts I come back to you. To be honest: I hate to slip up.


Hopefully I can work on my own in near future :-)


Please let me know what you think about my proposal.

ediFanoB

QUOTE
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
(Douglas Adams,1952 - 2001, English humorist & science fiction novelist



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message 10: by Lisa
05/15/2008 06:47AM

83445 Edifanob,

It's probably best if you just ask for any help needed from this GR Librarians group as a whole. That's what we tend to do here

For now, just look around and do what you feel comfortable doing. You'll learn if you're interested.

And it's really fun helping out. But you're not obligated to do any combining.

There is also the Librarians Manual which gives more helpful information:

http://www.goodreads.com/help/...

But everyone here is happy to be helpful as well.

Have fun with it.




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message 11: by Edifanob
05/15/2008 08:58AM

1120366 Lisa,

thank you for your answer.

It is always good to learn something about how this group is working.

I will look around because I'm interested.
I will also read the Librarians Manual.

I still have some books on my list which need to combined. I would like to start with.

One more question concerning way of sharing information:

Should I post a comment after combining books?
Is there someone who collects all these data?





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message 12: by Lasairfiona (last edited 05/15/2008 10:17AM)
05/15/2008 10:15AM

284562 Kristen: For popular authors, wiki is the way to go. Just click one of the other languages on the side and there are all the titles. Often the english titles are next to the translated title. Sometimes you can figure it out by year but the translations tend to come out later. If the foreign edition has a similar title, babelfish really helps but it doesn't always work. Foreign editions sometimes have completely different titles just for fun. An author's website might have the foreign edition (GRRM did but few other do) and it is worth a shot.

Sometimes there is just nothing that helps but those methods are what I use and I get through a lot.

Edifanob: We don't really collect the data but it is nice to comment here when you finish an author if only for the bragging rights. Mostly we post here for authors that need help. If someone requests help with an author, it is polite to inform them here when you have finished with that author and mention any problems you had that you could not solve. Otherwise, no - we don't really collect data though a list of the number of edits is compiled each week and you can get a tag on your profile saying # top librarian. I enjoy that part.

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message 13: by Lisa
05/15/2008 01:34PM

83445 And all librarian edits are logged:

http://www.goodreads.com/revie...

Go to meet people, to top librarians, to recent librarian edits to get to the above link.

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message 14: by Edifanob
05/15/2008 03:11PM

1120366 Dear members,

they way you treat people creates a familiar atmosphere which is quite important for people like me who are not experienced GR Librarians.

Thank you

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message 15: by rivka
05/15/2008 06:32PM

171430 :)

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message 16: by rivka
05/18/2008 12:38AM

171430 Olivia Goldsmith could use some help from a German-speaker. The titles seem not to be direct translations, so some familiarity with her work might help too.

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message 17: by JG
05/18/2008 05:04PM

48404 L. Ron Hubbard has 2 German titles listed. This is one of them: Kampf um die Erde, Kt, Bd.1, Menschheit in Gefahr: Die Saga aus dem Jahr 3000. This is the second title: Kampf um die Erde, Kt, Bd.3, Die Vergeltung: Die Saga aus dem Jahr 3000


Are these the same as Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000?

Thanks!

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message 18: by Michael
05/18/2008 07:34PM

834216 It looks to me like Battlefield Earth was published as multiple volumes in German (this is fairly common for large English works) and these are the 1st and 3rd volume (Bd. is an abbreviation for volume or book or something along those lines; I don't know the exact translation but I've seen it many times before). Thus, these should not be combined with the standard Battlefield Earth since they are not the full book.

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message 19: by JG
05/24/2008 07:58PM

48404 Stephanie Kallos has a German title, Die Porzellansammlerin, in her list of books. I was wondering if this was possibly the same as the book Broken for You. It looks like a little bit of a stretch to me, but the book does revolve around a lady's porcelain collection and I can make that German word into porcelain-something.

Thanks!


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message 20: by Michael
05/24/2008 08:02PM

834216 JG, My guess is you are correct, but I couldn't find any confirmation on the web.

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message 21: by Cait
05/24/2008 11:15PM

1005037 Can anyone tell if this Paulo Coelho (book titles in Arabic, French, and Italian, I think) is the same as this one?

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message 22: by Michael
05/24/2008 11:21PM

834216 Yes it is. I combined them and combined the two stray books with their proper editions as well.

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message 23: by Nia
05/26/2008 12:46PM

431678 @JG: Yes, "Die Porzellansammlerin" is the same as "Broken for You". I combined them.
(German National Library: http://www.d-nb.de)

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message 24: by JG
05/26/2008 07:11PM

48404 I found this Harry Potter book. I fixed the author's name, but now I'm not sure about which other book to combine it with. I think it's in Norwegian and I found a weird thing where Google translated the page for me, so I think it's the Order of the Phoenix, but the description is just vague enough that I'm not sure. Here's a link:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/...

Thanks!

And thanks for fixing Broken for You, Nia.

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message 25: by rivka (last edited 05/26/2008 09:32PM)
05/26/2008 09:30PM

171430 Well, the ISBN-13 is equivalent to this edition's (of Deathly Hallows) listed ISBN-10. So they must be duplicates; I'll merge them.

Edit: Done!

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