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. This field is required as of June 2011, but many older Title records do not have it populated. The software treats title records without a Language as if their language was English.
• Translated titles are entered as Variant Titles of the original title.
• If a book was written in one language, but a foreign language translation was published first, then the original language title is entered as the canonical title and the translated title is entered as a Variant Title.
• When entering the name of an Author or a title that uses non-Latin characters, use the English (i.e. transliterated) form of the name/title when known.
• 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, make a note in 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 the Notes field.
• 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 instead while short fiction titles were entered using the original title record. This policy was abandoned in December 2011, but many older records still use the old convention. They will be migrated to the new standard as time permits.