Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

So, what happens if I have a Russian (or any other author writing in a language not using Latin letters) author, whose name has more than just one spelling in different languages? Which name is to be used as the primary author?

If the primary authors are different, I cannot combine the different edition of her books, which is something I would really love to do, because it's the same book, just in different languages ...

An example would be this lady here:

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

Her name is spelled differently in English, German and Italian:

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

There are some other spellings of her name which I can dismiss as wrong, since clearly only the Russian edition of her books are listed under them. But those three are all definitely right, in their respective countries of publication ...

Looking at other authors with Cyrillic names and works in English like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky they have been put under their Anglicized names. I'd say the same would probably be the case here.

Yes, the primary author should be the Latin spelling.

This is not about Latin or non Latin character languages, but about different Latin based languages.

I take the English author name as primary author and ad the German/Dutch/other language author name as secondary author.

I guess the same should be done with Arabic authors' names: the name in English being primary author and in Arabic as secondary author. Many Arabic authors' names are written already in this way.

@rivka

Yes, the problem is not the Latin, but which one of the different Latin spelling.

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From the general mood of the thread I get that the one used in UK and/or USA should be used, but it might be nice to have a general guideline. There are a lot of different authors who may end up with the same problem since their names are spelled differently in different countries (I run into this problem a lot with English and German spelling of Russian authors).

Renske wrote: "I take the English author name as primary author and ad the German/Dutch/other language author ..."

The problem with having the different spellings as secondary authors is you'll end up with a lot of unnecessary authors. I'd just roll it all up into the English spelling.

Kim wrote: "Renske wrote: "I take the English author name as primary author and ad the German/Dutch/other language author ..."

The problem with having the different spellings as secondary authors is you'll en..."

Hmmm ... The problem I see there is that most of the German users, for example, will still search for the author under the German name. The question is what is worse: many authors or spelling which will be regarded as wrong by some users (and is not the name on the book)?

I think as long as the book title is correct in the language they are using it should be fine as it will direct them to the authors' listing.

Unless they implement a way of having different "editions" of authors so you can have a field that is hidden from the front end but contains their name variations for the search engine to check.