Alias (name variant) for work titles

[indy133]

@AgathaCrustie

It is a convoluted method though!

just a bit, at least we have a method that helps at the moment.

[Madir]

@mr_monkey

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.

I wonder, why the original author should still be mentioned, as I stated in my message above, the relation is already in the database and as @AgathaCrustie mentioned, the translation was not written by the author. Every duplicate information is a potential risk of wrong information.
Couldn’t it be an option, that a work is either written or translated?

[iainhallam]

@indy133

If you add a compilation of translated works and you have no separate works, the only place where to add information about the translated work is the edition (like in bookogs). How do you link information about translation (translator, date of translation a.o.) to the alias of the original?

There’s been a lot of conceptual work on aggregates in the FRBR field - here’s a summary: https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.59n3.120

A compilation of translated works would be a manifestation (seems like an edition here) containing several expressions (works on BB, since the overarching work-as-concept layer doesn’t exist here?), and with its own expression and work (separate from the contained expressions) that can contain information about the editors, etc. The issue of where to put the shared translation information looks like it arises because the work and expression layers have been merged into one here. Each translated expression should have its own title, and the work can collect the titles of the expressions for adding to its alias lists, or not as is needed.

One implementation question that occurs if you follow that model for compilations/anthologies, is whether an edition can contain multiple BB works? I’ve not done a lot of editing here to find out yet.

As an aside, I personally tend to think of expressions as “variants” or “versions” of a text, which can be published in many different forms. When people talk of a “third edition” of a textbook, they usually mean both a new manifestation (different cover, etc.) and a new expression (the revision of the contents). With fiction publication, often there are several versions of the text with multiple publications of each, so the separation of work, expression, and manifestation (with items as individual copies) becomes very useful for properly describing the metadata without duplication.

[coolpisc]

@mr_monkey

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)?

@Deleted_Editor_2146972

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.

But Latin alphabet is still the international alphabet, and transliteration standards exist. ( ISO 9 - Wikipedia ). While no one can force the entire Internet to follow the same standards, i can see how it makes a lot of sense to standardize transliteration of any names and titles into Latin alphabet, to provide most editors with at least one alias for an entity they’ll be able to deal with. Subjectivity is mostly because a lot of popular languages with different phonetic rules use Latin alphabet, and users aim first at being able to pronounce what they write, but for BB’s needs transliteration does not need to be phonetic (international editors will not have to read the entities aloud to edit), it’s fine if the result of technical latinization does not read good in any real language (no anglo-centrism), it should rather aim at being precise and uniform. So it may be useful to recommend using the same online transliteration tool to everyone (this can work for Cyr —> Lat), or eventually build latinizing into the interface.

Compared to music releases, i expect books to rarely be meant usable internationally, that may cause BB’s language handling choices to have to be different from MB’s.