Alias (name variant) for work titles

Yes and thx…just a few years in the internet and some reading experience…

Exactly that’s the problem. If you have more works with diff. translators you won’t know who did which translation.
Unfortunately I’m not a programmer and even don’t know the correct terms, but afaik an “alias field” is something like an attached field. You can’t add any information to this field without adding this to the “original” field.

I hope this is correct (maybe monkey will tell us that this is no problem at all) and in some way understandable.

I had the benefit of reading your previous comment a number of times and it started to make sense to me. You are quite correct that translation data is lost in respect of the Work. That is unavoidable.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with that as I believe the Work should only relate to its original form. If you have 80 different translations of a particular book, then there will be a mountain of translation data that could be potentially listed on the Work. I’m a firm believer in the KISS principle.

However, there might be a solution in having a supplementary work sheet that could be hyperlinked to the alias name where additional data could be recorded. It might be feasible, but like you I’m not a programmer.

(I have made an edit as I put words into your mouth and it was the wording of your comment rather than an explicit suggestion that made me think of a work sheet)

Me too + the computer game genre “Hack And Slay” :wink:

Enough for today, maybe we’ll get some illuminative explanations from the “chief ape”

Read you tomorrow…
good night

Likewise thank you for an interesting conversation. I might just get to bed before the Sun comes up.

Thanks for the interesting discussion. The problem you mentioned above concerning a separate work for each language could be solved in a different way. From a technical/database point of view I would do it in the following way:

Let’s say you have a work written by author and translated by translator into translated work. Then I would use the following connections:

Under work
work was written by author
work was translated to translated work

Under author
work was written by author

Under translated work
translated work was translated by translator
translated work is a translation of work

And under translator
translator translated translated work

This would avoid a long list of translated works under author and does still have complete information.

On the page it is still possible to show something like : author wrote work which was translated to translated work 1 by translator1 (,…), because all information is in the database.

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Yes, I think there are many possibilies on BB to manage and sort all different relations. That’s a good thing…

Then for the moment I would continue without adding the author to each translation of the work and only add the translator (if known).

The debate over whether translations should be separate Works or not has been had previously, and we communally decided to give translations their own entity.
The main reason for that is we we will want to enter more complete information (such as dates, collaborators, etc.), and having the single Work for all versions would make this process very messy.
Hence why it was decided to separate translations into their own Work, with the appropriate relationships with the original author and original work, the translator(s), and any other relationships appropriate for that translation.

There are also plenty of cases in literature of famous translations over time, and we want to be able to differentiate between the translations of a same original Work (think for example of Mark Twain re-translating " The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County in french, and publishing the original short story and both translations in a same edition)
Erratum: I misremembered the story; Twain translated the french translation back into english. Please replace that example in your mind with Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin in prose.

To illustrate what I meant in terms of Work aliases, here’s a random example: The Comfort Station (Work) – BookBrainz
The original title in kanji is “冴えない彼女の育てかた”, and in katakana “Saenai Heroine No Sodatekata”.

We could also possibly want to add a translated title to the same original Work (“Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend”) for those of us who don’t read or speak Japanese, although I also find this approach to be quite anglo-centric usually.

As for the original question of Works published under different names, I suggested two possible ways to solve the issue in this post: Next alias problem: aliases in collections/anthologies - #4 by mr_monkey
Let me know if that does not answer your question or if I misunderstood.

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Some translations are sublime and some are just complete rubbish. Personally, I don’t think that is relevant.

I can accept a translation as a unique Work, but frankly I don’t want them displayed in the author’s database alongside the original Work titles.

If for example, an author has published 120 books and each of those books has been translated into multiple languages, then that is a lot of material to wade through. It is very confusing.

I would like to see just a list of original language Work titles displayed in the author’s database. Users could then open the relevant Work (which is searchable as it has the various aliases) and possibly there could be a list of hyperlinked translation Work titles at the bottom of the Work page and these can be selected. That way the original language title is the parent Work and all the translated titles are linked to it.

Don’t worry about that. I’m quite sure that there will be many sorting possibilities later. A list with the original works here and a list with translations there…

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We can certainly present translations completely separately, and I think that would indeed be much better.
Currently, we already present some relationships differently from others.
That’s how we achieve the ‘Works’ table view of an Edition, for example, while other relationships are shown under the ‘Relationships’ section (The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (Edition) – BookBrainz for an example)

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wouldn’t katakana be “さえないヒロインのそだてかた”? “Saenai Heroine No Sodatekata” is the transcription I think.
But that’s not important, of course. This case makes a lot of sense, since it makes the title readable for most of the users.

What I meant was: Adding all translations of a work as aliases makes no sense to me, because these translations will be represented as works. So at the end we would have two identical lists of names.
I hope it’s clearer now.

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Pffft, brain fart. I meant romaji :slight_smile:

I agree absolutely. We don’t want endless lists of translations names on a Work page, nor does it make sense when we have separate translation Works.

The tricky part will be defining the guidelines: we both agree having a Work’s name in at least different scripts is beneficial in some cases, but how do we formulate that? And how do we formulate it without it being simply “also put the english title if it’s not in english” (which in my opinion is too western-centric/anglo-centric)?

Wouldn’t “phonetic transcription” be the correct term?

OK this has relevance to something I have just encountered.

The Martian by Andy Weir Work which someone had loaded up with 13 language aliases, but to be fair the system allows it and you can even specify the language. It does seem pointless because when you add the translated title with the correct Relationships via a Work and an Edition, they all become visibly linked.

I find transliterations for authors and titles highly subjective and slightly embarrassing. If the Works are configured right and the author has aliases I can’t see that this practice is necessary.

Can you give an example. Romaji is the official Japanese transliteration (Transkription in German). So you can’t think about this example.

This relates to Russian authors whose works haven’t been translated to English. When trying to find information for profiles on the internet, I found these individuals might have half a dozen transliterated names. The whole process seems to me to be highly subjective.

In the case of Japanese book titles I don’t see that it is necessary to list a transliterated title when in my experience that is never used on any translation edition. I don’t understand Japanese script but it is easy to differentiate one title from another, especially if you have completed 15 or more 村上 春樹 (Haruki Murakami) Works.

No one to my knowledge used transliterated titles on Bookogs apart from occasionally incorrectly listing one in the Original Language Title section of a book submission or generating a Works with that title. If memory serves me correctly, the guidelines expressly forbid it.

I don’t know if this is a typical German phenomenon but I know that in nearly all German pre-ISBN books orginal titles were written as a transliteration. They never used kyrillic letters let alone Chinese or Japanese signs. So in these cases it might be a great help to have some variants of transliterations as aliases´.

So instead of titling, for example: ダンス・ダンス・ダンス (English: Dance Dance Dance) with a German title, in this case Tanz mit dem Schafsmann, the German pre-ISBN book would have been titled Dansu Dansu Dansu?

lol…No the German title could have been anything, maybe just “Tanz Tanz Tanz”. But the Original title would be written as “Dansu Dansu Dansu”.