On combining information from multiple languages into an edition's metadata

[P.]

Greetings. I'm new to Goodreads, and it's observed that there's a case that happens quite often:

1. An edition is in Chinese and it's not yet translated into any other language at all.
2. The corresponding page on Goodreads, however, has both English and Chinese info in its metadata.

Here's one example:
There's a Chinese book "人间卧底" whose ISBN is 978754956436, and on Goodreads its page is https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
On the page you may see that the title, author, description, and publisher fields are all in English + Chinese. (The English translation looks to be correct by its meaning. But as there's no officially translated edition, I suppose the translation may come from a volunteer or some machine-translating services.)

The question: may I ask whether this behavior of combining English and Chinese texts into metadata of a Chinese-only book is recommended or allowed regarding Goodreads policy?

My personal ideas:
1. Although it may benefit English speakers in recognizing the metadata (but anyway the book itself is not available in English), it does not look like a good practice.
2. It makes it much harder to combine different editions of a same book. E.g. for the "人间卧底" example above, there's another edition (Kindle edition) on https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2..., but it's unable to combine the two editions, due to different authors ("Ma Liang 马良" vs "马良").

This reported issue does not apply to only this one example. Instead, I've seen rather occurrences. And below are a few more examples:
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...

As I'm new to this site, I haven't yet got the librarian privilege. Otherwise I'll try editing the metadata directly.

[Ayshe]

Pengyu wrote: "The question: may I ask whether this behavior of combining English and Chinese texts into metadata of a Chinese-only book is recommended or allowed regarding Goodreads policy?..."

No, it should be in Chinese if that is the way it is on the book itself. From Goodreads email: If you are manually adding a new edition that we did not previously have in the database, all data must be entered in the same language as the edition in question. If it is an English language edition, all data must be in English. If it is a Spanish language edition, enter the data in Spanish.

Problem is some records are imported (and have been with "translated" titles/authors on the source where they are imported from) or users who don't know the policy. Here's the first book on amazon, with translated title: https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Un...

I corrected titles and authors for the books from your links.

[P.]

Thanks a lot Ayshe for the clarification and the edit! :)

[lethe]

And in this case, the English title is also on the cover. In another thread, rivka said if the cover also states the title in English, even if it is a Japanese Chinese-only edition, the English title should be given as well.

[Ayshe]

Ah, I missed the English title on the cover. How it was added in that another thread - as subtitle, after slash or just after the Japanese title?

[lethe]

It wasn't specified: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Bilingual editions (should) have the titles separated by a = , but since these are not bilingual editions, I don't know.

I think a / would be best, or maybe just straight after the Chinese title.

[Ayshe]

I added it straight after. Looking at the covers I'm wondering whether "Confessions of an Undercover 人间卧底" wasn't correct, considering the English part's position on the cover, but I guess it's what Iris says in the other thread that "It's just some kind of decoration or propaganda in Chinese culture" and title shouldn't begin with it.

[lethe]

I agree with putting the Chinese title first.