Letters that are not in English alphabet in author names and book titles

[Zala]

Most of the authors from my country (Slovenia) have non-english characters in their names and book titles - these are normally letters š, č and ž, sometimes ć or đ. They often get listed withouth them, replacing š with s, ž with z and č with c. I don't think this is correct, so I normally fix their names, but today I remembered that some people might not be able to see these letters. What should I do? Keep fixing the names and book titles, or leave them with their "english" name? The problem is, s is not a replacement for š, for example, sh is. But I just think author name should be spelled they way it is in his native language. What do you think?

[Jenna]

I prefer the correct spelling, too, but am aware that some people won't be able to find them, then. I don't think if one is searching for a name that has a "special character" and one doesn't use it, I am not sure if they'll come up. Enter all the names twice? Once with the correct spelling, once without? One obviously wants to try to keep the author profiles together, also, and this will complicate matters also.
Is there any policy?

[rivka, Librarian Moderator]

Policy is that they should be spelled as they are in their native tongue, special characters and all. This means that right now someone has to go through and clean up the non-accented versions that people inadvertently create every so often, but it's the best solution we have until the aka function is created.

[Laura]

thanks Rivka, I just make this correction on a French author. Could you please tell more about this new coming aka function? Thanks.

[Lisa]

Laura,

The AKA function has been on Goodreads' to do list for a long time, I think it's one of those features that would be hard to program.

It would allow us to combine author pseudonyms of one author into one author. So, if an author published under 2, 3, 4, or even more names, we'd be able to see all the names as they were but also see that they were all actually one author.

This would apply when authors used vastly different pseudonyms and also when sometimes they use a middle initial or name and sometimes they don't.

[Laura]

thanks Lisa!!

[Jekaterina]

Oh, excuse me, I'm very new for all this. And I have a question about all russian books, written in russian language. Authors and titles are written in many ways like official english titles, russian titles in cyrillic alphabet and also russian titles in translit(and it has so much variations), because of it many books are not combined and it's very hard to find books you need. So, is it some kind of rules for such books? May be this question was answered already, I just can't find. Thank you!

[Agnes]

I'm curious if keeping the "sort by title" field with only English characters would help if the title includes foreign characters?

[Michael]

If we left the English characters in the sort by title field, wouldn't that make it impossible to find the title if you actually use the correct spelling, though?