An author's name in different language

[Malak]

Hi there!!
I was looking in to this author and I found that his name is spelled differently in French and in English. his is originally a Russian
what name do I use for him in Goodreads?

English: Anton Chekhov
French: Anton Tchekhov

should I use the French name for the French translation and the English name for the English translation?

[Cait]

We generally use the English transliterations in these cases for all editions -- to combine editions, the primary author needs to be the same. If a different language has the author significantly different, that transliteration can be set as a secondary author so that people searching on it can find books. In this case, "Anton Chekhov" would be the primary author and "Anton Tchekhov" would be a secondary author.

[Inna]

Hello everybody,

1) I'd like once again to touch upon the problem of different spellings of an author's name in different languages, and, consequently, multiple profiles for one and the same author.

To have multiple profiles is very confusing and inconvenient, because profiles for a single author may be as numerous as 8 and it's not the limit (from my experience), it takes the reader nowhere. Ideally, they should all be merged as one profile per one person.

It results from the GR rule to add the name of the author AS GIVEN IN THE BOOK.

I don't know whether it can be done technically, but it seems to me that there must be something like this:
say, all the major alternative spellings are mentioned in some special box in a profile (an aka box? which is hidden from view of an ordinary reader, but available for search purposes only; I think Wikipedia data can be used as a guide, and the reader should be offered some other suggestions in case of partial matches. No additions should be allowed till the user checks them all and confirms his attempts somehow), and when the reader performs a search, he/she will be automatically referred to the profile he/she needs if he/she keys in one of these spellings.

Do you happen to know when the "author aka" feature will be available? It's as indispensable for GR as air is for breathing.

Just imagine hordes of librarians creating profiles, merging them, revising them for hundreds of hours on end, separating, merging again, creating new ones... What a gigantic waste of time more than often taking GR nowhere!

2) Can anything be done about carelss users? For example, there already exists a profile for Andrey Volos (Андрей Волос). But no, somebody adds a book the spelling of whose title differs from the existing one in one letter (transliteration rules are different and ambiguous) and adds another Volos. While combining the two profiles I accidentally lost some info, which I could not retrieve. I regret my blunder and apologize for it, but the unconscientious person in question is also partly responsible.

3) And there's another major problem - accidental loss of information while merging profiles. There's no "undo" function, so the error cannot be undone. Can anything be done about it?

[Sandi]

Inna wrote: "2) Can anything be done about carelss users? For example, there already exists a profile for Andrey Volos (Андрей Волос). But no, somebody adds a book the spelling of whose title differs from the existing one in one letter (transliteration rules are different and ambiguous) and adds another Volos."

Sorry but I think you're doing your fellow goodreaders an injustice here. I don't know 100% how goodreads gets its information on books, but I think they import it from other sources like amazon? Because the same thing happened to me once, I looked for the ISBN of an old Dostoyevsky, and goodreads gave me a page with Dostoyevsky as the author - no first name. A new profile just for my copy, that I didn't create myself. Now if I hadn't been a librarian, I wouldn't have been able to do anything about that.

[Paula]

A lot of the bad information actually comes via the automatic imports from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Amazon is particularly well known for having incorrect meta data

[Inna]

Sandi, Paula,

Thank you for your paying attention and for your opinion.

Certainly, I wouldn't say that ALL mistakes are due to careless users. I agree the Amazon and other databases can provide incomplete or incorrect data. Amazon is especially poor when such matters as non-English-speaking writers are mentioned. As my mother tongue is Russian, I had more than one chance to see with my own eyes that the info on Russian-language books, for example, can be VERY incorrect. So, OZON and LibEx are much better databases for Russian books, and I believe similar databases can be found for many other national publishers, bookshops, and booklovers' excahnges.
That's why IMHO a bona fide reader should only
1) add books he/she has read himself/herself and can vouch for the edition and his/her competence in such matters as the author's name, origin, bio, and bibliography at least;
2) it seems that in other cases one shouldn't be guided entirely by one source only. It's prudent to check in other databases, reference books, etc. So, my personal rule is: Add a book and an author only when you are 100% sure. That's what I try doing.

Anyway, I think that one shouldn't add new books and authors at a drop of a hat. For example, returning to that unfortunate Andrei Volos example: would you rather add "Hurramabad" and "Khurramabad" as separate books without checking the matter thoroughly? Somebody didn't bother, which led to some confusion.

That's why I'm not thinking in terms of punishment - oh, no. I was thinking in terms of providing more references and suggestions, recommendations maybe WITHIN GR when smth is being keyed in with search purposes first. Statistical probability suggested as based on the percentage of coincidental elements? Search results more likely and less likely? I don't know, but it seems worth considering.

[Erich]

I for one would favor a better integration of languages other than English. Because once you have an author profile, the short bio has to be written in a specific language, the link to wikipedia has to point to an article either in English or another language after all.

So please! I'd welcome the technical implementation of language specific author pages which would mean that technically (the author ID in the GR database) will point to one and one only author, while the name shown, the biography etc... will be in the user's preferred language (profile) or in the language the book is written in (to be discussed).

[[deleted user]]

Eiseli wrote: "I for one would favor a better integration of languages other than English. Because once you have an author profile, the short bio has to be written in a specific language, the link to wikipedia has to point to an article either in English or another language after all."

Actually, no-one says that the author profile has to be written in only one language. When I've been adding information of Finnish authors I've added "about the author" texts in both Finnish and English. There is plenty of room there in the field. I've also marked the different languages with short language codes so it's easy to see the that there are several languages in the description. (Examples: Anja Snellman, Salla Simukka)

I don't see why there couldn't be added links to several Wikipedia/reference sites on the description too. To me it would seem wrong to add a link to Wikipedia to the Official website field anyway. Wikipedia is no-ones official site.

Eiseli wrote: "So please! I'd welcome the technical implementation of language specific author pages which would mean that technically (the author ID in the GR database) will point to one and one only author, while the name shown, the biography etc... will be in the user's preferred language (profile) or in the language the book is written in (to be discussed)."

This probably should be taken to the feedback group, but I'll comment it here anyway. I don't know a lot about this, but to me this seems like a horribly lot work. Implementing something like this from the technical point of view can't be any easier than the aka feature and even that is a really hard one. Also, because there isn't descriptions in several languages for most of the authors so far, it would take quite a while before the data would be there to make this feature usable.

The other problem I always have with "site in different languages" type implementations is the position of smaller languages. Usually, when a site gets different language versions they usually are (rather understandably) some of the big western ones: Spanish, German, French, etc. But if GR for example would subscribe to this system, I would feel like I'm expected to add all the information in one of the implemented languages and wouldn't feel like I can really add my own language to the author descriptions anymore. And when we talk about Finnish authors published only in Finnish, it's really convenient to not have the information in Finnish too. I don't know if others feel this as as big problem as I do tough.

[Inna]

It seems to me that Wikipedia has developed at least one worthwhile idea: whenever a profile of one and the same person in different national versions of Wikipedia is concerned, there's such a script to be found at the bottom of the page(this helps to correlate all the articles and refer them to one and the same person):

[[an:Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin]]
[[ar:إيفان بونين]]
[[az:İvan Bunin]]
[[be:Іван Аляксеевіч Бунін]]
[[be-x-old:Іван Бунін]]
[[bg:Иван Бунин]]
[[br:Ivan Bunin]]
[[ca:Ivan Aleksèievitx Bunin]]
[[cs:Ivan Alexejevič Bunin]]
[[de:Iwan Alexejewitsch Bunin]]
[[el:Ιβάν Αλεξέιγεβιτς Μπούνιν]]
[[en:Ivan Bunin]]
[[eo:Ivan Bunin]]
[[et:Ivan Bunin]]
[[fa:ایوان الکسیویچ بونین]]
[[fi:Ivan Bunin]]
[[fr:Ivan Bounine]]
[[ga:Ivan Bunin]]
[[gd:Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin]]
[[gl:Ivan Bunin]]
[[he:איוון בונין]]
[[hi:इवान अलेक्सेविच बुनिन]]
[[hr:Ivan Aleksejevič Bunjin]]
[[hu:Ivan Alekszejevics Bunyin]]
[[hy:Իվան Բունին]]
[[id:Ivan Bunin]]
[[io:Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin]]
[[it:Ivan Alekseevič Bunin]]
[[ja:イヴァン・ブーニン]]
[[ka:ივანე ბუნინი]]
[[ko:이반 부닌]]
[[ku:Îvan Bunîn]]
[[la:Ioannes Bunin]]
[[lt:Ivanas Buninas]]
[[mr:इव्हान बुनिन]]
[[nl:Ivan Boenin]]
[[no:Ivan Bunin]]
[[oc:Ivan Alekseievich Bunin]]
[[pl:Iwan Bunin]]
[[pms:Ivan Alekseevič Bunin]]
[[pnb:آئیون بونن]]
[[pt:Ivan Bunin]]
[[ro:Ivan Bunin]]
[[ru:Бунин, Иван Алексеевич]]
[[sk:Ivan Alexejevič Bunin]]
[[sl:Ivan Aleksejevič Bunin]]
[[sr:Иван Буњин]]
[[sv:Ivan Bunin]]
[[sw:Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin]]
[[tg:Иван Алексеевич Бунин]]
[[th:อีวาน บูนิน]]
[[tr:Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin]]
[[tt:Иван Бунин]]
[[uk:Бунін Іван Олексійович]]
[[vi:Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin]]

I was thinking of something along these lines for GR. A special aka box with such scripts?

Mind, I am far from saying that Wikipedia is the best and the most reliable source and I'm not trying to tie up GR and Wiki. But the feature in question does seem reasonable enough.

As far as the info on the authors is concerned, it seems to me that it's best to provide some info in English for the benefit of all those people who'd rather read it in English (GR is an English-language site, don't forget) + if the librarians find it worthwhile the same bit of info in the mother tongue of the writer (or a Wiki link if the article there is extensive enough).

[Cait]

Inna, there is an AKA feature in development, but we don't yet know the details of how it will operate.

As for author descriptions, I don't know if we have a formal policy for languages, but the policy for book descriptions seems applicable: a book description should be in English and/or the language of the edition, so having an author description in English and/or the language of the author seems right.

[Inna]

Thank you, I'll be waiting for the AKA feature. I hope it will solve a lot of problems.

[Erich]

If I understand the AKA feature well, it's definitely an improvement. Looking forward to seeing implemented!

[Kiss of a sniper]

Looking forward to this AKA feature as well.

[Kerry]

Don't hold your breath!

[Kiss of a sniper]

Oh...maybe sth. alike?

[Miles]

Is this sort of thing fixed yet?

I mostly read books in Japanese these days. A few years ago I tried to add my favorite books on goodreads but basically gave up because the author / title / etc situation on GR was so screwed up.

You'd get the same author added multiple times under different names -- the original Japanese, romanized versions of same (and sometimes multiple different instances of the latter), etc -- and each "author" would be associated with different lists of books, not due to any difference in the name actually used on the book itself, but because different GR adders had found different author entries when adding each book. Sometimes people would fake it by adding more than one of these fake entries, but sometimes they wouldn't. The result was that was actually difficult to find all the titles by an author (an important function of a site like GR!).

The situation was even worse with titles because GR only allows a single book entry for a given book, enforced using the ISBN, so whether the actual title or a romanized version of the title (present nowhere on the actual book) is used depended solely on the whims of the person who first added it, and there was no way to change this.

It was such a mess I eventually just gave up...

GR probably works a bit better for English books, but these issues will still show up occasionally even then.

It seems a shame, because it should be perfectly possible to address such problems technically, but GR seems to be kind of stuck...

Beyond simple correctness, it's important to have the actual original titles / names (not just romanizations) because that's what's written on the book itself, so it can be critical for searching in a store etc. [Moreover, in Japanese it can be non-trivial to map from a romanized name to the actual name.]

[Kiss of a sniper]

Miles, I agree with you absolutely;


but amazon itself and worldcat use those romanizations as well...
same problem with russian (or just cyrillic language) books.. All messed up with weird romanizations...one could never find those books, if you wanted to...

[Miles]

❦Silent Seduction❦ wrote: "but amazon itself and worldcat use those romanizations as well..."

Hmm, I don't know about Cyrillic books, but in general this isn't true for Japanese booksellers, and Amazon doesn't include romanized titles either. [Not surprising, as 99% of the people who can read the material in the first place would not benefit from it.]

I'd never used worldcat before, but just checked it out, and it does seem to include romanized alternate titles and author names, at least for the various examples I looked up.

From what I've seen, worldcat might actually be a good example for goodreads to emulate, as they appear to have thought about these issues to some degree and come up with a reasonable approach to handling them...

[Kiss of a sniper]

Miles wrote: "Amazon doesn't include romanized titles either. ..

I looked up this book on amazon.com: "奇想と微笑" / or "太宰治傑作選"
no results
I entered then: Kisō To Bishō
and found this book...
but this is not on the title.
If enter: "Kiso To Bisho" completely other results with not the wanted book.


Same with all other not English books...

I enter "устинова" (prounounced like ustinova) : nothing.
I enter ustinova ...and get many books.
Let`s pick a title, like "Oligarh S Bol'shoj Medvedicy". On amazon.com you get this, as you can see in the title there isn`t even a russian version (not even in brackets) !

On amazon.de, you have to enter: Oligarkh s Bolshoi Medveditsy (or medwedici) (again other romanization, why? It sounds in both cases so weird!!)

If you enter original russian title: " « Олигарх с Большой Медведицы » " you get only kindle edition which is wrong written in russian =) not the paperback one which you can only find with romanized version of the title.


"as 99% of the people who can read the material in the first place would not benefit from it"
Aggree =)

[Miles]

❦Silent Seduction❦ wrote: "I looked up this book on amazon.com: "奇想と微笑" / or "太宰治傑作選" no results　 ... I entered then: Kisō To Bishō and found this book..."

Notice that the book title in the Amazon header is romanized; this isn't the case for most Japanese books on Amazon. The reason it is in this case appears to be because the data is coming from external sellers (the 7 new + 4 used etc). [This book actually is in Amazon's system in "native" form too, as a separate entry, but their search seems to be a bit wonky if not done on the "home" site; searching on amazon.co.jp, for instance, will find it using the Japanese title, but not via the romanized title.]

A more typical example of a recent book that's sold by Amazon itself is something like this (notice that the title in the Amazon header isn't romanized):
世界から猫が消えたなら
http://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/4838725027

If you search on amazon.co.jp, any reasonable substring of the Japanese title finds it; amazon.com is a bit pickier (they may have country-specific site tweaks to searching), and only initial substrings match, but in either case, searches on romanized forms return nothing relevant. In my experience this is the case for the vast majority of Japanese books on Amazon.

One takeaway from looking at this is that Amazon's handling of the issue doesn't seem particularly great either -- they don't seem to have any real concept of multiple titles -- but ends up working OK for the common case where they're just deferring to an authoritative source, usually the publisher. The book you mention seems to have fallen through the cracks because Amazon US doesn't sell the book directly, but represents U.S. sellers that do, and thus ends up using the information from these U.S. resellers, which isn't as good as what they usually get from publishers. [Amazon Japan does sell the book from the publisher, so does a better job.]

[Kakha]

Hello,
If a writer writes only in his native language (other than English), what language is accepted to write his full name on Goodreads author section? Book names we should write in native language of particular work on which it has been published at the first time?

[Emy]

If NONE of author's works are translated into English, then their name as on the published cover is preferred. If one is translated into English (or French, German, Polish, etc.), then the Latin alphabet version goes in the first author box, and the name as on the cover is listed as the second author in the box below.

E.g. Описание города Харькова. Путеводитель по Харькову

[Kakha]

Emy wrote: "If NONE of author's works are translated into English, then their name as on the published cover is preferred. If one is translated into English (or French, German, Polish, etc.), then the Latin al..."

Thanks!

[Kakha]

Kakha wrote: "Hello,
If a writer writes only in his native language (other than English), what language is accepted to write his full name on Goodreads author section? Book names we should write in native langua..."

Dear Emy,
I have one more question. On what language we should write author's biography if one or more their works are translated into English? Only English? In this case it should be better to create author's second profile in native language with exactly that name which we indicated in second author box. Right?

[Paula]

Yes if the author has books translated then you can create author profiles in those languages for each name. Biography should be in same language where possible

Also good to hyperlink each name

Example

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

[Kakha]

Paula wrote: "Yes if the author has books translated then you can create author profiles in those languages for each name. Biography should be in same language where possible

Also good to hyperlink each name

Yes, I already realized and did it.
Thank you Paula

[Kakha]

Emy, Paula, I have one more question...
What if Writer wasn't born in the city but in the village? What we should wrote in writer's "city of birth" box?

Thaks!

[Emy]

City of birth is Location, so just list the Village + region etc.

NB: For the UK and other similar nations, it's nice if you list the constituent parts of the location where it doesn't show under the country.
e.g. "City": Bolton, Lancashire, England OR Edinburgh, Scotland

NB 2: You don't have to fill in the country drop-down if it doesn't "fit" - very useful with older nations that are no longer current / with the same borders.
E.g. See Mikhail Lermontov

[Kakha]

Emy wrote: "City of birth is Location, so just list the Village + region etc.

NB: For the UK and other similar nations, it's nice if you list the constituent parts of the location where it doesn't show under ..."

Thanks,

Should I write Village, Country etc. firstly or only after a name?
E.g. Berwickshire County or County Berwickshire?
Bishopsbourne Village or Village Bishopsbourne?
Besides, if you have a time, please check my edit for George Smeaton. I do not know when exactly Scottish Borders was established, before or after of born this author. Thus was I right with my edit for "city of birth" box?

Sorry for an additional questions but please point me, why my librarian edits aren't counted and I am not in the list of librarian rankings (for my country and for world as well) until now?

Many thanks

Kakha

[Kakha]

Maybe you can answer me when you have a time.
Thanks again.

[Paula]

There is no need to write, village or county in the field

Check out John Knox profile for how his village and county are written

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

[Kakha]

Paula wrote: "There is no need to write, village or county in the field

Check out John Knox profile for how his village and county are written

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show......"

Yes, Now I know it.
I meant my another question:
why my librarian edits aren't counted and I am not in the list of librarian rankings (for my country and for world as well) until now?

[Paula]

The stats only include users if they have a country set in their user profile. Check your account settings and set a country if you want to be included in the stats

[Kakha]

Of course I've set a country from a very beggining when I registered at Goodreads...

[Arenda]

You have a private profile. The country has to be visible for everyone to be included in top lists.

[Kakha]

Arenda wrote: "You have a private profile. The country has to be visible for everyone to be included in top lists."

Just made my gender and location visible to everyone but nothing changed regarding a top lists yet.
Dear Arenda, please check once again my publicity statua now. Maybe it requires more time to change status of my account?

[Arenda]

Your profile is still private. Having a private profile means your location is not visible. For further questions about functionality, please contact Goodreads Support

[Paula]

In addition, the stats only update every month or so, it will not update instantly

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Arenda wrote: "You have a private profile."

You can still be on the lists with a private profile, as long as the country is set to be visible. However, as Paula mentioned, it won't make a difference until the next time stats are run.

This is not really a Librarians Group issue, but one for the Feedback Group, or you may wish to use the Contact Us link on the Help page. Librarians can help with issues pertaining to specific book records or most related issues, but have no control over general site functionality or related issues. Closing thread.