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Authors needing help from foreign-language speakers
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rivka, Former Moderator
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May 13, 2008 01:54AM
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Re: Irving WallaceWiki 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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
Mod
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
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/librarian
But everyone here is happy to be helpful as well.
Have fun with it.
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?
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.
And all librarian edits are logged:http://www.goodreads.com/review/recen...
Go to meet people, to top librarians, to recent librarian edits to get to the above link.
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
Mod
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 3000Are these the same as Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000?
Thanks!
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.
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!
JG, My guess is you are correct, but I couldn't find any confirmation on the web.
Can anyone tell if this Paulo Coelho (book titles in Arabic, French, and Italian, I think) is the same as this one?
Yes it is. I combined them and combined the two stray books with their proper editions as well.
@JG: Yes, "Die Porzellansammlerin" is the same as "Broken for You". I combined them.(German National Library: http://www.d-nb.de)
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/show/24...
Thanks!
And thanks for fixing Broken for You, Nia.
Mod
Edit: Done!
I did what I could, but Dean Koontz desperately needs help from someone who understands French. I found German titles on Wikipedia, but there are still a few stray German titles that need help also.
Astrid Lindgren needs a LOT of work from someone who understands German.
I just worked on Minette Walters. I combined the german and dutch titles with the english ones, but there are still a few french titles, I was not sure about.And, can anyone tell me, why I can't combine the one edition of "The Camelion's Shadow" (ISBN 9780307264633) with the other editions of this book? Every time I try, it says: "You combined 10 editions", but they are still seperate.
Hermann Hesse could use help from a German speaker -- I can recognize just enough book terminology* to be pretty sure that there's a few Steppenwolves that need combining and probably others as well. (Once that's done it looks like it'll be needing some null-ISBN cleanup, too, but I don't want to start on that until all the editions are lined up....)* I wonder just how many languages I can say "large print" and "special edition" in nowadays! :)
Robert Silverberg has a number of titles in French (I think) that need some work? I combined the only obvious one, but the others... :)
I just combined a bunch of variants of Madame d'Aulnoy into this profile. She could use help from people who are comfortable with French, Spanish, Italian, and German as well as English. (Some editions may be modern enough for Worldcat to be of some use. I don't have time to look at them all right now, so I can't say for sure.) Thanks to anyone who has the time for this. :)
The only edition in Italian was of a selection of tales that could not be combined to anything. I have combined other ones which identical titles
Lasairfiona wrote: "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)
P..."
Did this one get worked out?
The book is Irving Wallace's The Guest of Honor The Guest of Honour, but all of the descriptions are in Spanish and there is no cover. I'm on my way out the door, but will check again when I come back.
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)
P..."
Did this one get worked out?
The book is Irving Wallace's The Guest of Honor The Guest of Honour, but all of the descriptions are in Spanish and there is no cover. I'm on my way out the door, but will check again when I come back.
Wallace's foreign editions are combined now with the english ones.
Could someone check these two books, please?
http://www.goodreads.com/book/edit/15...
and
http://www.goodreads.com/book/edit/15...
they aren't listed on WorldCat.
Could someone check these two books, please?
http://www.goodreads.com/book/edit/15...
and
http://www.goodreads.com/book/edit/15...
they aren't listed on WorldCat.
For 34, I can't actually find any meaningful data for those ISBNs (aside from the publisher and publish date, which everything I've looked at agrees is 1986, by Signet Books). Perhaps they were going to be published, but then were cancelled? Or something else?
Ingram is the source of both editions' data; maybe something went wrong in the import process, and the title was replaced by the number (likely the series number).
