What's better: having translator in own column or adding him in "Author"?

[droopy]

I'm a native English speaker. I have some books originally in some foreign language that are translated into English.

For example, The Brothers Karamazov, authored by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and translated by Constance Garnett.

I initially created my own column called "Translator", where I'd have the name of the translator there.

But now I wonder if it's best to include the translator in the "Author" field. So in this case it would look like "Fyodor Dostoevsky & Constance Garnett".

What are the pros and cons of either method of storing translator info?

[theducks]

I just put Joe Blow (trans) in Authors, is what I do.
Same with some other significant rolls: Illus, Creator

(stuff in Paren does not affect sort)

[droopy]

Ah interesting, Ducks!
Thanks for the info about parentheses.

[dunhill]

I did not know it !! You saved me a headache.

[droopy]

Ducks,
with your tip, I'm now slowly adding not just translators ("trans") into the Author column/field, but also editors ("ed"), name of person writing the introduction ("intro"), and the name of those writing the foreword (fore) and afterword (after).

[theducks]

Originally Posted by droopy

Ducks,
with your tip, I'm now slowly adding not just translators ("trans") into the Author column/field, but also editors ("ed"), name of person writing the introduction ("intro"), and the name of those writing the foreword (fore) and afterword (after).

I forgot to mention I use (ed)'
I also moved the actual authors to a custom (author-like) column (to keep the filename short when using Send to device). I make a link in Preferences Searching, so that I can still search by Author

[droopy]

I learned that there can't be any spaces inside the parenthesis.
How'd I discover this?
One person was both translator and editor of a book and when I entered him as Bob Smith (ed and trans), the author sort field was

Arendt, Hanna & Smith, & trans

the "ed" part wasn't included.
So what I did instead was used a slash
Bob Smith (ed/trans)

[hobnail]

I was curious to see what happens when you work this from the bottom up; with an epub you can add a translator to the metadata using Sigil's metadata editor specifying them as another author (dc:creator). The metadata for author has a modifying property named role which I changed from Sigil's default aut to trl. Sigil seems to be unconcerned/unaware of multiple authors and gives them both the same id, cre, which causes validation with EpubCheck to fail:



(After I made this screen shot I changed the role value from translator to trl; trl apparently is the standard value.)

Here are the relevant lines from the content.opf:

  <dc:creator id="cre">Author</dc:creator>
  <dc:creator id="cre">Translator</dc:creator>
  <meta refines="#cre" property="role" scheme="marc:relators">trl</meta>

If you use that epub file as-is with Calibre it shows the author as "Author & Translator", or at least it did the first time I tried it before I thought to run epubcheck on it. Now when I do that (without the epubcheck and duplicate ids) the author shows up as Unknown. It added a new dc:creator to the content.opf with the value of Unknown. I have no idea what I did differently the first time. ... Argh, I don't understand, I did it again and it's showing the author as "Author & Translator".

I noticed that if I close Sigil's metadata editor and open it again it deleted the aut role from Author. Not sure if that's related.

Anyhow, moving along ... If I fix the id and change the one for the translator to cre2 then when I add the book to Calibre it ignores that author (the one with the role trl) and shows the author as simply Author.

[thiago.eec]

Originally Posted by hobnail

Here are the relevant lines from the content.opf:

  <dc:creator id="cre">Author</dc:creator>
  <dc:creator id="cre">Translator</dc:creator>
  <meta refines="#cre" property="role" scheme="marc:relators">trl</meta>

Bear in mind that the "refines" attribute is only valid under EPUB 3.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by thiago.eec

Bear in mind that the "refines" attribute is only valid under EPUB 3.

Thanks, I didn't know that. I've been using epub3 with sigil since it lets me use the newer html stuff, which in my case isn't much; probably just <header>.