Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Copying a msg I mistakenly posted in GR feedback/suggestions forum:

I think it would be highly beneficial to the site in general to update the librarian manual to include directions on what to do with author names when adding/updating books written in a language that uses a non-latin script or additional, non-English characters. it should also be clear that the latin-character version of the author name should be listed first, so as to combine with translations.

As far as I know, the "combining editions with more than one author" paragraph of the manual does address this, but not in a clear enough way, and there recently were questions in the forums on what to do with special characters in authors names.

I often view books written originally or translated into my native language, Greek, and have found that too many GR librarians tend to mistakenly place the Greek-script name first in the list of authors, or only use the Greek name. I'm sure there are a number of other languages affected by this, including the ones that have special characters, even only a few. If the info was added in the manual, I'm sure we would have fewer cases of that.

concerning the same problem That I faced in Arabic language .
Duplicity in some authors’ pages :
For authors who writes originally in languages that do not use Latin (Roman) letters , or for translated books & names into such languages. (??)
here is what I gathered from other side discussions , feel free to edit :)

For transliterated author names , the usual workaround is set the Romanized name as the primary author (the Latin spelling listed first on all editions ) and the non-Romanized name in the secondary author position , This allows all of the books to be combined under the same author profile but retains the transliteration so that people searching with that character set can find results.
It looks like that's what's been done for this book:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21...
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76...
and should be done for the others as well , but for books that only exist in its original language and would not have been translated , there's no need to have an English version of the author at all.

Personal suggestion :
Would not be easier - because of the last note - to put the author’s name in its original name in the first slot ?

Yes, romanized, that was the word I'd been looking for.

However, Nile daughter, I disagree with your suggestion because
1)especially if a book is recently published there's no way to know whether it will be translated into other languages in the future.

2)even if somebody was certain a book is not translated and never will be, it is still possible another book by the same author gets translated. it;s always useful to be able to tell whether an author has more books out, even if they're not in a language you know.

The paragraph is not mine , It is a merge of Ciat & Rivca posts :)
I was going to make a separate thread to summaries the discussions in , then I found yours , so I thought this is the right place for us to corporate , so thanks :D
For my suggestion , I understand your points , it is just that the books enter first with their original languages , so It is easier to add the Romanized name in the 2nd slot , but I will respect the system in any case , I just hope this issue will be clear once and for all ..