Book non english releases

[T.rue]

Hi,

I live in a German speaking country and although i read most of the books in English, my family and friends don't. Now when i would like to recommend a Sanderson book to anyone, finding the German title usually requires going to the books page on Wikipedia and then changing the language. Which is a good trick if you want to translate a thing instead of a word. Now i wanted to buy the German version of Tress for my niece and the Wikipedia article does not exist. After some googling i could only find one sentence mentioning the book in Brandon blog post.

This way of finding the translations does not seem very good to me. Unfortunately Brandon does not provide any info about that. So i would suggest creating a table in the wiki, where one axis are the books and the other axis is the languages. In each cell you then can have the translated title(s), the publisher, publishing date and whatever else is interesting.

What do you think about this idea?

[External Gills he/him]

I've also run into this issue (trying to find if a particular Sanderson book has been translate into a particular language) and there is simply no convenient place that lists them all at the moment. I'd be up for helping to put something like this together.

Btw, if you haven't found it yet, I searched amazon.de and the German title of Tress is "Weit über der smaragdgrünen See"

[T.rue]

Thank you, it will be released in November. I'm happy i am not the only one who had this problem.

[T.rue]

I wrote a script to grep all the translation names from wikipedia and transform it into a wiki markup table. So it could be added to the coppermind. It is not polished yet and i have no rights to create a page, but i'll leave it here. Maybe someone with the rights and motivations wants to work with me on that.

table.txt

[LadyLameness]

Hey! I really like this idea - let me take it to the staff so we can chat about it a bit, there are a few kinks that might need ironing out. Where you interested in creating this yourself? The biggest hurdle we often run in to is people being free to implement a change. 
 

Here is the best resource I can think of - I don’t know if it will help with Tress but Mark (the guy behind the website) is well established in the collector community and has a lot of knowledge of international editions. 

https://collectingsanderson.com/

[T.rue]

I am very happy to contribute with my mediocre coding skills, but the question is, if my approach is even a good one. The collectingsanderson site is really good as well, and one could ask the creator where they get their information, if there is an other web resource that i could web-crawl through to create the table.

[External Gills he/him]

3 hours ago, LadyLameness said:

The biggest hurdle we often run in to is people being free to implement a change.

I can also help. I don't have programming skills, but I have time and my Google fu is strong. If someone can start the page on the coppermind, and start the table, I'm sure I can figure out how to expand it.

My best source is this library catalogue:

http://www.worldcat.org/

The filters let you search by language, but it's not entirely accurate. It misses my Dutch mistborn translation when searching for TFE and adds it to the WoK translations instead, for example.

[LadyLameness]

No coding needed! Some very basic syntax is really the only thing required and it is almost all laid out in the Coppermind help pages or can be copied from another page . 
 

If someone is able to draft me what is needed tablewise (column headers etc) then I can create a basic one that can be filled in. The Keepers are figuring out the best place to put this - I’ll drop a link to the page once it’s created, it’ll likely need to be a subpage due to length. 

[T.rue]

I based the Table i created on this and tested it in a page edit preview, but the headers are still a bit of a mess, i will fix that. Then you have your base from where to work from.

[T.rue]

2 hours ago, LadyLameness said:

I’ll drop a link to the page once it’s created, it’ll likely need to be a subpage due to length. 

The table markup is ready.

[LadyLameness]

What columns/information do you have? It may impact where is best to put the information. 

[T.rue]

The column headers are Title of the book in English, publishing year, and then all the languages. Row headers are the names of the books. 

So it's about 20 columns and as many rows as Brandon wrote books.

 

 

[External Gills he/him]

In the interest of keeping the table widths somewhat contained, we could make separate tables for mistborn, stormlight, cytonic, alcatraz, etc. That way we can make the book titles be the columns and the languages the rows.

[T.rue]

6 minutes ago, External Gills said:

In the interest of keeping the table widths somewhat contained, we could make separate tables for mistborn, stormlight, cytonic, alcatraz, etc. That way we can make the book titles be the columns and the languages the rows.

that would work for now. But i would suggest see how it looks first.

[LadyLameness]

Hey! Sorry for the delay, there was quite a bit of back and forth in the end. The Keepers were also worried about potential sizing of the table and agree with the idea of having something with fewer columns - it would be particularly difficult on mobile of it was too long. 
 

These are the two tables that we put together and the second worked a bit better and is the preferred choice. Does that fit what you’re going for? You should be able to copy and paste the formatting from the second table but mediawiki is touchy so if you have any issues then definitely reach out and someone can help.  https://coppermind.net/wiki/User:Paleo

In terms of pages, we think it would actually be best to split the series into their own table and add it to each series page - these pages are probably the first place people would look for the names. There was some back and forth on what to call the subsection, but in the end it was decided that ‘Foreign Editions’ would be best so that the UK versions could be included. Here’s the category with all the book pages in it https://coppermind.net/wiki/Category:Books
 

[T.rue]

Sorry it is taking so long, I found out that my initial approach does not get the right titles in many cases. I try to parse it out of the text and then create the tables in the form you posted. It just need a bit more work.

 

I added a first version here:
https://coppermind.net/wiki/User:Paleo
 

but there are many more kinks to iron out.

Edited June 30, 2023 by T.rue

[LadyLameness]

Don’t worry about pacing, take as much time as you need.  The only deadline is the one you set yourself. 
 

I think this is looking terrific! You’ve gotten through so much already, nice job. Do you have a Coppermind account by any chance? I was just thinking it might be useful to shift this to one of your own user pages so Paleo can have his back. 
 

Edit: also just in case you hadn’t seen (or anyone else helping out hadn’t seen) we have a Discord for Coppermind work! It makes it a bit easier to have conversations and organize work, though it’s not required if you would prefer to stick to communicating like this.
 

https://discord.gg/3c2GhXH

[External Gills he/him]

I got started on SA, on my own user page:

https://coppermind.net/wiki/User:External_Gills

I've limited myself to actual translations, and not English versions by a foreign publisher.

I'm good to move to Discord.

[LadyLameness]

14 hours ago, External Gills said:

I've limited myself to actual translations, and not English versions by a foreign publisher.

 

Keepers had quite the chat about this! The preference in the end was to include the foreign English editions as well so that the tables covered everything. That way, if anyone needs to (for some reason) find the foreign English titles, they're all in the same place. I didn't want to bother people who were working on this and push work on anyone so I was going to just add them once all the tables were finished but you're welcome to if you want! 

I know T.rue has found some of the Stormlight titles so it would be good check in with them just to make sure neither of you are doing more work than you have to. Your table is looking nice and meaty with information which is also great! The format though won't work for mobile and will be unreadable - one of the Keeper's (Paleo) had a play around with tables and found that a vertical table was much more readable. The second table on this page (https://coppermind.net/wiki/User:Paleo) is the format that will work best and if you go into edit on the page you should be able to copy the formatting so you don't have to deal with building the table at all (thank god for that). 

[T.rue]

I tried my best with the Wikipedia approach, but i think i need a better source:
https://coppermind.net/wiki/User:T.rue
What do you think?

Those captchas are killing me, it feels like doing the homework for a bully AI.

[Starwatcher]

2 hours ago, T.rue said:

Those captchas are killing me, it feels like doing the homework for a bully AI.

Sorry to hear they're giving you trouble; I know I've struggled with captcha a lot on occasions too. It seems like you haven't been logged in when making your edits? If you log in, you'll become exempt from captchas after a couple edits. Are you having trouble logging in as well?

 

As far as the content goes, I'll tag @External Gills and @T.rue to try to get you on the same page (both figuratively and literally in the sense of picking one of your user pages to do the work on, I guess) so that neither of you end up doing a bunch of duplicate work. Also, don't worry about ISBN or other information; for now let's keep it simple with just the titles. If you're having trouble with any of the formatting (Invention knows the MediaWiki syntax can be a colossal pain), Paleo's user page has a basic example of what it should look like and it is a tried and true Coppermind practice to just copy and paste the syntax from another page. Beyond that, I've also found MediaWiki's help page useful when making tables. Of course, you're welcome to also hop on our Discord and ask for help there.

[External Gills he/him]

17 hours ago, LadyLameness said:

The format though won't work for mobile and will be unreadable - one of the Keeper's (Paleo) had a play around with tables and found that a vertical table was much more readable. The second table on this page.

You mean a separate table for each book, rather then putting them all in one table, the way that T.rue is doing? (Minus the ISBN, as Starwatcher said.) I based my table of Paleo's second one and just added extra columns for each book. I suppose I don't quite understand what you mean with a "vertical table.

Don't worry about the duplicate work, this was just to get a feel for the table syntax. And I might have gotten carried away a little bit. I couldn't stop with a half-complete table, you know XD.

13 hours ago, Starwatcher said:

Invention knows the MediaWiki syntax can be a colossal pain

I actually found a pretty handy tool to generate table syntax. It does like to spread the syntax out vertically, but that's easily fixed, and doesn't affect how the end result looks.
https://www.tablesgenerator.com/mediawiki_tables
 

As for getting on the same page: @T.rue do you mind if I start adding to your page, since you have more stuff than I do at the moment? We seem to each have found translations the other missed. I'll keep to the same formatting you do, just adding content.

[LadyLameness]

2 hours ago, External Gills said:

You mean a separate table for each book, rather then putting them all in one table, the way that T.rue is doing? 

Yep this was what I meant - unfortunately adding more columns extends the width of the table too far horizontally in mobile and has always been a massive pain so it’s easier in this case to minimize the number of columns and stick to separate tables for readability sake. 
 

Though that of course does make the page really long - something that might help in terms of navigation is adding a table of contents and splitting up the tables (maybe into series?) with headers (the final page is going to require something like that but don’t feel like you have to put it in if you don’t feel the need - it can always be added later). That way you can always jump to the right section and open only that section instead of having to edit the whole page and endlessly scroll through the edit box to find the right place. 
 

With there being both cosmere and non-cosmere books being collected my suggestion would be something like this in whatever order is preferred series wise:

“ {{toc}}

== Cosmere ==
=== Stormlight ===
Tables

=== Mistborn ===
Tables 

(repeat)

== Non-Cosmere ==
=== Skyward ===
Tables 

=== Alcatraz ===
Tables

(repeat) “

[T.rue]

@External Gills my table is created entirely automatically using a python script. I would like to keep improving my script until little to no manual work is necessary. I don't know if you can help me there, but if you got an other source where i can get the info from i can try to incorporate it.

write me on Discord if you want.

[External Gills he/him]

OK, I'll leave it to you and I'll add anything else I find until after you post the tables for real.

My source is this website: 

http://www.worldcat.org/

You can search for a book and there is a language filter option on the left. It's not 100% correct because it lists the Dutch mistborn era 1 books as WoK translations, so I don't know if you want to use it. You'd have to verify the results manually afterwards.