How are we supposed to enter sort names of edition and work titles? Obviously, we can’t follow the MusicBrainz guidelines stating the last name should come first, because most titles don’t consist of a person’s name. Book titles can range from a single world to a whole sentence and so I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do in this case. Do I just copy-paste the title, if it’s spelled in the Latin script (or transliterate a non-Latin one) or do I need to do something else?
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In most cases just copy and paste the title. It’s correct.You can use the ‘guess’ button for English titles. It works well in most cases. And I just change the sort name in other languages if it’s obviously ok. ‘Article’+ ‘noun’ changes to ‘noun, article’…I am not even sure if we really need this feature for titles at all. Maybe it makes sense for sorting song titles…but book titles, or poems, periodical articles? I don’t see a good reason. Furthermore, many users do it wrong anyway. Two examples: “Trees are green” translates to “Les arbres sont verts” in French.You can’t move the ‘Les’ to the end without making it grammatically incorrect.
Another example: “The green Tree” translates to “Der grüne Baum” in German. If you remove the ‘Der’ the flection changes to “grüner Baum”. so “Grüne Baum, Der” is incorrect.
That’s why copy and paste is the best solution in most of the cases:
The goal of these sort name fields is not to be grammatically correct, but rather for alphabetical sorting purposes.
If I go to a French library and their books are sorted by title, I would find this one at “A” for “Arbres”, not at “L” for “Les”.
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I see…the rules seem to be the same for German libraries. But what I don’t understand is: when I , for example, display the works of an author alphabetically in the German National Library, the articles are also included and sorted alphabetically.
A maga…
A seldwylai…
A village….
That’s very confusing…
But okay….we follow the library rules. I will do my best and ignore the strange results 
You seem to be misunderstanding sort name there. The idea is to enter the name as it would appear in list. Usually in this case you put the articles after the rest of the title, orderwise it would be hard to find a work in an alphabetical list as there would be countless titles starting with “the” in English, or “le/la/les”. You use a comma to indicate the article is out of place. E.g. the sort name for “The Green Tree” is “Green Tree, the”, the sort name for “Les arbres sont verts” is “Arbres sont verts, les”. I don’t speak German, but I would assume the sort name of “Der grüne Baum” would be “Grüne Baum, Der”. You will find this title under green/arbes/Grüne. This isn’t agrammatical, it’s quite standard.
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Ok, I see you have changed the capitalisation. I personally always keep it as it is on MusicBrainz. I don’t know if that is correct or not but that’s what I do.
That’s a different issue, I think not changing the capitalization is probably more common. It doesn’t make sense to me, and I couldn’t find any rule or standard when I tried to find out, so I use the capitalization that makes sense to me.
But that doesn’t really matter, the point of a sort name is place a name is a list, and capitalization doesn’t affect that.
Yes, obviously. It just took me an hour to read about the library rules. The guide to creating a library entry is 150 pages long. You could call that complex
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That’s true. And you were right about most titles, if they don’t start with an article, you really just copy the title.
I assumed this was quite common, but you are a book adding machine and you didn’t know it so maybe it isn’t? It might be a good idea to explain it in the UI. Maybe a link saying “What is a sort name?” leading to an explanation.
An issue with the “guess” button is that it always just moves the first word to the end; so, if the first word isn’t an article the result just makes no sense. It’s possible that’s confusing.
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I spent 17 years at university and got to know the university library extremely well. But I never needed to know about this way of sorting titles. I either knew the author or I used the subject index.
Yes…good idea…would help a lot!
Best regards….’The Machine’ ,-)
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I do want to point out there is a small question mark icon that does give a brief explanation and example. Perhaps it could be improved though, if nobody notice it 
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One last question. Do I need to transliterate names and titles written in a non-Latin script like in MusicBrainz or can I leave them in their original script?
I add the transliterations as an alias at the moment…because I often use the German transliteration. The English transliteration is not always easy to find, when you deal whith German translations. But we haven’t discuss this topic yet…so I am open to every solution that works.
I checked that before replying here. It looks good to me, but it may be that some people aren’t familiar with the idea of sorting names alphabetically without the article, so the tooltip will just be confusing. We may need a documentation page explaining it.
I don’t think we talked about this before. In theory, if the original script is alphabetic, like Greek or Cyrillic, that can be simply transliterated, it shouldn’t make a difference, because it can be automatically transliterated and sorted. But for non-alphabetic languages like Chinese and Japanese, you would have to romanize it by the most standard system (e.g., pinyin for Chinese, Hepburn for Japanese), you can’t directly transliterate from a script without letters.
We might still transliterate other alphabets into Latin, just for the sake of standardization, but it seems unnecessary for me.
I’m not sure which of the two cases above you usually deal with.
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