Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Greetings,

According to the Goodreads Librarian Manual:

"Authors with books published in multiple languages should have their names dealt with similarly to those with pen names. All editions should have the primary author name as the standard or most common Roman (that is, English-language) version of the author's name. Editions published under another spelling of the name or the name in another language should have that name listed as the secondary author. Additional author profiles may be linked directly from the About Me section on the author profile."

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this only applies to authors who published published original works in different languages, and not authors who only published in one language and had their works translated for them. Is that correct?

I am asking as a certain Arabic author, Ghassan Kanafani, has all his books with the English author profile as the main one, but I believe this is a mistake by the librarian who organized his books. This author wrote only in Arabic, but had his works translated to several languages. Please clarify this guideline further in the manual.

Thank you
Sary

This applies to writers with translated works too, otherwise names such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Yukio Mishima or Lao Tzu wouldn't be in the database (and that would certainly be a problem for Western readers).