Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I was going to do some work on cleaning up the listings for the Strugatsky Brothers (Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky). They are Russian SF authors who have been translated into many languages. Since they are Russian, their names are in the Cyrillic alphabet. The problem is that both their first and last names have been translated into the Roman alphabet three or four different ways. Their English translations alone can be found under three different family names:

Strugatsky (by far the most widely used)
Strugatski
Strugatskii

Arkady (by far the most widely used) can also be spelled Arkadi and Arkadii.

This can and does result in a lot of possible combinations.

My question is this; what name do I use for them in the case of:
Original Russian copies
English language translations
Other Roman alphabet (non-English) translations (French, Spanish, German, etc.)

Thank you in advanced for your help.

Paul

You should take one version of the name as primary author, to make it possible to combine books. Other versions of the name can added as secondary author when that is needed.
Often it is the English version that is chosen as primary author.

Even for original Russian copies? I want to be sure before I start making changes.

Yes for all the books to be combined correctly so that reviews and ratings are all correct they need to be combined under 1 author name.

Edit: Check out Anton Chekhov, his has been done to some degree, the Russian profile could do with some more info but you will see the hyperlinks to each profile

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

Where books have been translated then that needs to be the name / spelling as per the Library of Congress since we use that as the decider where there are multiple different variants.

You can then add the Russian version in the secondary position, creating an author profile in Russian.

If none of the books have never been translated from the original language then you will keep all in the original language

Thank you both!

Paul

Library of Congress uses Strugat︠s︡kiĭ, Arkadiĭ Natanovich (which they would have arrived at using the LC romanization tables and not necessarily corresponding to any actual usage).

Can I just clarify whether this is accurate:

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
AND
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
i.e. Latin and Cyrillic alphabet versions of the author as separate author entries and then added twice to editions.

Correct.

No, I'm still confused how I should do this. I've read multiple threads about this but I'm still unsure.

There's currently at least three author profiles for russian poet Anna Akhmatova.

Anna Akhmatova
Анна Ахматова
Anna Ahmatova (at least Finnish translations use this spelling)

And this is the case with almost all Russian authors translated into Finnish. Should I just ignore the Finnish spellings of their names and use the English one as a primary and add the original as a secondary?

Where books have been translated then that needs to be the name / spelling as per the Library of Congress since we use that as the decider where there are multiple different variants.

So I would stick to Anna Akhmatova + Анна Ахматова as fitting with the LC system - х being kh.

Ok, that's what I suspected. I'll fix them. Thanks!

Hello! I just made librarian and I might have messed up a bit. I merged the Russian author Boris Akunin with the Russian spelling Борис Акунин, making the English spelling the correct one. The result was that some books now have two authors, both spelled Boris Akunin, e.g.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12...
Is there a way to clean this up automatically?

There is no way to clean this up automatically.

We not merge English and transliterated names so it is fine to have the name in English in the primary author position with the name in Russian in the secondary author position.

You will need to add the Russian version of his name to the Russian editions of the books in the secondary position if you want the Russian name back on the books.

If it were a text file one could do something like:

cat file.old | perl -pe 's/Boris Akunin, Boris Akunin/Boris Akunin, Борис Акунин/' > file.new

Is it generally a good principle to have the author's name spelled in different ways for each edition of a book? I'm new here and I'm sorry for asking about things that may be clear to everybody else. It seems to me it would make more sense to always have the English spelling as default and then add different ways of spelling to the author page, thus interlinking them.

There are no tools for Librarians to use to do this

The current policy is to have the transliterated name in the secondary position (if the books have been translated, if not the primary author name stays in the appropriate language). If the name is not in a author position you are not able to search by the foreign language name.

Links to all the profiles can be contained in the author profile to maintain additional links

Edit: Until we get the pseudonym functionality, this way is the best to keep all happy as much as it can

This might help those who haven't come across the LC system before:

Romanization Tables

Particularly:
Russian
Chinese

PS Paula, is a pseudonym function likely to happen in the near future? If it does it'll beat standard "See also" references into the ground!