Im currently adding some novellas and short stories by Gogol and came across the following:
According to MusicBrainz Guidelines a Alias is used for:
Aliases are used to localize an entity’s main name into a different language, especially into a different script (e.g. the Russian name Чайковский is known in English as “Tchaikovsky” and in German “Tschaikowski”).
… so i added the English and German title as an Alias for Gogols Work (with russian titles). It becomes searchable under the name this way, but the English/German name does not show up in search.
Now, i add the German translation as a work and i have too fill the disambiguation field because of the Alias.
- What to fill in here? something like “German translation of (Original Works Name)”
- what about the “original Name” of a work in general? I saw Homer’s name written in Greek, but his works in English transliteration. I remember, we had extensive discussions on this subject at bookogs…
- Looking at translations as works makes sense. But should i always provide the authors name when it comes to translations? Or editions of translations? I think it would save time if this could be inherited by the source of the translation
This has been discussed here:
https://community.metabrainz.org/t/alias-name-variant-for-work-titles
Aliases should only been used for name variants and transliterations from languages with different scripts (Kyrillic, Hebrew) or signs (Chinese etc) to latin.
We don’t use them for translations into other languages because we create works for translations.
1 Like
It’s also worth noting that despite being fairly young. BookBrainz has already managed to accumulate some “old-data-model cruft”.
Basically much earlier the idea was to add all the languages as alias on the work, so you’ll find some old works with every language named alias there (Harry Potter is a good example 
)
BB is still new and bb community is still so new, right now we’ve got an influx of bookogs people, an unexpected but welcome bostershot to our fledgling community -
If you see works with translation aliases, please fix them! :D
1 Like
I can’t send a private message, so @cloverfield (aka booknerd) a different language title is treated as a separate Work not as an alias.
For example: https://bookbrainz.org/work/86ce6c69-ee64-4ee4-a405-3be35bf9ba25 and https://bookbrainz.org/work/a0736cc9-2a4f-4100-a6b6-aeeb71ed548d are two separate Work credits, one for the English title and one for the German title. The translation is then linked to the original using a relationship of “is a translation of”.
1 Like
I don’t know if this has been discussed, but is an individual language translation considered a unique Work or are multiple translations in the same language listed on the one Work?
For example: there might be multiple German translations for a popular English book. Does each of these translations get its own Work, or are they just grouped together on a single Work?
1 Like
They get there own work. That’s one of the advantages of having translations as own works. This was a huge problem at bookogs, where you had to add the translator to the alias field when editing anthologies.
1 Like
If that is the case, then I suggest the disambiguation on the Work should be: “[translator’s name] [language name] translation”.
For example: “Rainer Wolfschmidt German translation”, or “German translation by Rainer Wolfschmidt”
2 Likes