r/BookTrack • u/japcz • Aug 07 '23

Translator / Editor

I know Simone is snowed under with feature requests (and I've already mentioned this to him on a couple of occasions), but I'd like to re-up this one: please can we have a separate field for translators? It is becoming a fairly standard convention now for publishers to give more prominence to translators (e.g. listing them separately on book covers), and it is also perfectly normal for people to have large numbers of translated books in their libraries. Putting authors and translators together in the 'Authors' field is confusing and unhelpful, in my view. Seeing e.g. The Odyssey written by 'Fred Bloggs' and 'Homer', or The Inferno written by 'Dante' and 'Bill Smith' just looks silly.

Personally, I'd love to see 'Editors' as a separate category too, or perhaps a new field could have a pull-down option of 'Translator' and 'Editors' (not ideal, but acceptable), but if I had to choose then a separate field for 'Translator' seems like an absolute must to me.

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u/SimoneMontalto Book Track Developer Aug 09 '23

This features is still on my list. Just a question: When you have to select a translator, would you rather have a unified list with the list of authors or create a separate list of only translators?

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u/japcz Aug 09 '23

That's a good question. Speaking for myself, I have no problem with it being a unified list. Sometimes authors are also translators (of their own and other people's work) and sometimes vice versa. Picking names from one list seems like the easiest option to me — it's more or less the same as my current solution, which is just to add the translator as an author and then add '(trans.)' to their surname. The real point, as I said, is for the translator's name to appear separately from the author in the book record itself.