Help:How to enter translations

This page is a help or manual page for the ISFDB database. It describes standards or methods for entering or maintaining data in the ISFDB database, or otherwise working with the database. Other help pages may be found via the category below. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page. If, after exploring the Help system, you still have a question, please visit the Help desk and let us know. We probably know the answer, but we need your help to know what we left out of the help pages. If you are new to editing the ISFDB, please see Help:Getting Started. For more on this and other header templates, see Header templates.

• All Title records have a Language field.
• Translated titles are entered as Variant Titles of the original title. Translations done by different translators are entered as different Variant Titles.
• If a work was written in one language, but a foreign language translation was published first, then the original language title should be considered the canonical title and the translated title should be considered variant title. The year of the canonical (i.e. parent) title should be set to publication year of the canonical title, not to the year of the translation (though the latter one was released earlier).
• When entering authors, titles, publishers and publication series that use non-Latin characters, use the original (rather than a transliterated) form. Later on you can edit the entered author/title/publisher/publication series and add one or more transliterated forms of the name/title.
• If you don't know the language involved, you may find it hard to distinguish the title from the subtitle or tell exactly what the publisher name is. For example, publisher attributions often include the city name, but you may not be able to tell where the publisher's name ends and the city name begins. In these cases, update the Publication Notes field to explain what you have entered.
• There is currently no support for a "translated by" field in the database. Translators should be recorded in each Title's Notes field.
• Bilingual or multilingual books, i.e. books with parallel texts in two or more languages, effectively contain multiple different titles, one in each of these languages, and should be entered as such. A multilingual novel should be entered as an Omnibus while a multilingual novella, novelette, or short story should be entered as a Collection. After your submission has been approved, use the "Make This Title a Variant Title or Pseudonymous Work" page to turn the newly entered translated titles into variants of the canonical title. If one or more of the newly entered titles are duplicates of pre-existing titles, make sure to merge them.
• NOTE that at one point non-English translations did not get their own title records. If they were novels, they were entered as Publications under the original language title. If they were short fiction titles, they were entered using the original title record. This policy was abandoned in December 2011, but a few older records still use the original convention and need to be fixed.
• For a list of translations of terms and abbreviations in publications see ISFDB:Language-Specific Abbreviations