Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
Policies & Practices
>
Profiles in a foreign script
date
newest »
newest »
Mod
#1 or #2. There's no reason to remove information if it's good.
Well, I'd have voted for option 1 but either 1 or 2 are fine. Please don't delete!
Mod
Rivka, I thought about this after I posted and decided you were right.
Cait said: There's no reason to remove information if it's good.But I'm guessing most librarians can't verify that the information is good.
Do we have any idea, as a group, as to the language skills of the librarians? I, for one, could struggle with Spanish, but am only fluent in English.
As for the question, my vote would be for #2.
Thank you!Maybe do a poll for languages?
Petra, I like your idea of a poll for languages. Ideally, it would cover fluent, some skill, no skill, and the poll could give information (depending on how long the question can be) about needing librarians who know how to read various languages.Rivka?
Mod
Rivka, you're right. I'd forgotten. Anyone can. I'd love to see one. Good luck to the person who wants to tackle it while trying to include as many languages as possible. If it shows up, I'll "vote" on it though.
It doesn't need to be complicated. The poll could ask for any skill level in (say) French, Spanish, German, Italian, Bahasa Indonesia, Arabic, Farsi and Other.
People checking 'other' could be asked to say which language and level of fluency - fluent or basic.
There aren't generally enough replies to polls that it would be complicated to tabulate comments, especially if the answers in the comments were restricted to certain words.
If the nos. for level of fluency in the first-mentioned languages was desired, it would be easy enough to do several more polls just asking for (say) French - basic or fluent.
I guess Petra. There are a lot more languages in the foreign language books here. But other could work as long as there weren't so many of those that members found it hard to scroll through. You want to create a poll?Edit: Maybe wait for other language suggestions?
Edit again: How about Hebrew? Chinese? Japanese?
I have friends here who write in other languages too: Finnish, Danish, etc.
Mod
I guess Flemish is close enough to German to not need its own category.
I wrote '(say)' because I only gave those languages as an example. The poll could contain as many languages as the poll-maker wanted. The poll could be of just the main languages of the books in the GR database or all the minority ones too. A summary from tabulating other languages in comments would provide an overview. Possibly it could then have its own thread and people could go there when looking for help with a foreign language book.
Wikipedia has a list of the top 34 languages used on the internet. Would that be too long of a list for a poll?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_i...
1 English
2 Chinese
3 Spanish
4 Japanese
5 German
6 French
7 Korean
8 Italian
9 Portuguese
10 Russian
11 Malay
12 Dutch
13 Arabic
14 Polish
15 Swedish
16 Thai
17 Turkish
18 Vietnamese
19 Persian
20 Romanian
21 Czech
22 Hebrew
23 Danish
24 Finnish
25 Hungarian
26 Greek
27 Catalan
28 Norwegian
29 Slovak
30 Serbo-Croatian
31 Ukrainian
32 Punjabi
33 Slovenian
34 Icelandic
I've seen longer lists when voting for group reads. This seems like a good idea, but there should probably still be some sort of "other" option. We'll never catch them all.
Rebecca. Interesting! Looks good to me. I'm not sure whether there are unlimited answers available in polls. We'd need 2 answers for each language: one for reads effortlessly and one for able to read with less skill but being able to do more than guess. (I'm sure there are many better ways to word those!)
JG, Exactly. I don't even see Farsi. Edit: Or would that be Persian?
Just thought about it. Our polls are currently "choose one" not "choose as many as you like". So that wouldn't really work after all.
Unless we ask for "other" and "3rd and 4th languages" or something like that in the comments. And someone would have to be willing to wade through and count them. Sounds pretty complicated now that you pointed it out, Rebecca.
Mod
Yeah, the fact that polls cannot currently handle more than one response could be an issue. I suppose we could just make it a thread instead.
Maybe one thread for skilled reader and one for those who can muddle through?
I can read Hebrew but I'm not currently equipped to type it.
It sounds like a sticky thread with an updated first post listing the replies and their levels of fluency would work best -- I'd be willing to keep that updated.Something like:
French
Librarian A, basic
Librarian B, fluent
Librarian C, basic
Chinese
Librarian A, basic
Librarian C, fluent
Spanish
(None yet -- please volunteer!)
etc., with the list of names being profile links for ease of messaging.
?
It sounds good Cait and thanks for your offer!
Well, I'm not exactly sure where we're going to post these requests, once the language list is filled in, so i am going to post this here.I was working on the Sisyphus list with "-" author. However, for the following book I don't know the language script well enough to tell what it is (it looks Arabic to me, but what do I know...)
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15...
There's no ISBN so I can't just go to Worldcat either. Can someone else take this one? Thanks.
Mod
This applies in particular to the profile for Carlos Fuentes http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/... but I would also like to know what the policy is on profiles in foreign languages.
There are 124 works for Fuentes, of which only 6 (showing on GR)have been translated into Arabic. However the profile is in Arabic. Do I:
1) Add the English profile beneath the Arabic one,
2) Add the English profile above the Arabic one, or
3) Delete the Arabic one as this website is almost entirely in English and the majority of its users speak English whether as a first or second language. (It would be very difficult to use Goodreads without a good knowledge of English).