Adding books in non-english languages...

Hi, I am quite new to LT and still workning with addning my IRL library to this one. I live in Sweden but as about 3/5 of my books are english language it took me some time to realise that the site won´t accept books returned from the Swedish databases if the letters Å (å), Ä (ä) and Ö (ö) is involved - the link looks clickable but the click don't result in anything.

The letter Ö (ö) is easy - I just change to another "coding" in the browser. But Å (å) and Ä (ä) I have found no fix for, and so parts of my library will not be added here easily.
As the browser normally do not have any difficulties with this (a LOT of the sites I visit daily are swedish language) I assume that there is some glitch in the sites coding.
Could you please look in to this? Or else remove the swedish sources, so not to make false promises?

I have lots of Swedish books. While I have not had a problem with clicks that "don't result in anything", I do find the character issue wery annoying. I'm sure LibraryThing would get a lot more active users from Sweden if it were solved.

There are three Swedish libraries on LibraryThing. Stockholm University used to work quite well ("ä" and "ö" was correctly returned, but you had to fill in the "å":s afterwards), but now seems to be completely broken since a while back.

Libris, which is the most complete and up to date library, unfortunately returns ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), where all non-standard characters gets completely garbled into things like å in LibraryThing. Very annoying. More info here:
http://www.libris.kb.se/tjanster/teknisk_info/z3950.jsp

Göteborg University is a bit unreliably, and strips non-standard characters from entered titles, which still is better than garbling them. Also, it does return an ISBN, which Libris doesn't.

A fix for these things would be great.

Since I posted the original message I've started to wonder if this (the "not able to click on links containing garbled letters"-problem) could be a browser problem? I'll check som probable solutions and return with an answer (if any arises...).

If you at LT could work on if from your horizon, it would be great - I have a few friends hesitating to use LT because they've experienced the same or similar problems as I have...

Here's one example on how messed up an author can be, look att Gabriella Ahlström. It says there no works by this author but still you can see that linka878 has one book. If you go to Linka878's catalog and click on the link of the book you end up on this page http://www.librarything.com/work/1624516&book=6880229.

There must be some way to solve this problem.

So, it seems to be a classical Internet Explorer vs Firefox-problem, where links containing garbled letters works in FF but not in IE.
BUT sometimes the message "Request-URI Too Large
The requested URL's length exceeds the capacity limit for this server." is returned from LIBRIS when I try to add a book...

As before - it would be nice if you at LT checked this problem out!

Oh sorry I should have included that I'm using Firefox 1.5.0.7 on Windows XP

>4 bonne1978:

Hmm. Seems there is something quite wrong with the coding there.

In my view, the book title at that LT book page reads: Ecce Homo : Ber&ttilde;telsen Om En Utst<ilde;lning, though it should read: Ecce Homo berättelsen om en utställning (boecker.se). While the latter is good, the former seems to be rather crappy--i.e. unacceptable indeed.

And it gets weirder. On Gabriella Ahlström it says there's one conversation about the author but if you click on the link for it you get to this page:
http://www.librarything.com/talk.php?author=ahlstrmgabriella.

Seems there is something quite wrong with the coding there.

That's what happens when you interpret ISO-8859-1 as MARC-8.
Message #2 mentions that some libraries return Latin-1.

LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS is E4 in ISO-8859-1.
But E4 in MARC-8 is COMBINING TILDE.
So, the ä is interpreted as a diacritic on the following t and together they are rendered as &ttilde;.

It's not just foreign libraries that return 8859-1; MIT does it too.

Thus, LT SHOULD know what kind of code is returned by what libraries and deal with it in a correct way.

Never knew there was some t tilde character.

Worse, because of what you explained, LT's misinterpretation affects several sequential characters, resulting in an unreadable (and intirely unusable) mess.

LT 'd better deal with in rather quick, otherwise the presentation at the Frankfurter Buchmesse might become, hmm, quite messy. That 'd be no good.

In German, characters as i.a. ö, ä, ü and ß are quite common.

The American English capitalisation (capitalization) system too is quite uncommon in other languages, if not nasty and confusing at least.

Capitalisation?

Different languages happen to have different rules for capitalisation. If LT can't deal with those different rules in different languages in correct manner, it 'd might better turn its entire automatic capitalisation module OFF. For the way it is dealing with non English language titles now, is making it a ridicule at best.

Library data actually tends to obey the more common (by number of locales, not number of users) capitalization rule, Uppercase initial and that's it, rather than the American English Rule that Uppercases Most of the Words. So, LT is localizing what is stored for American display. I assume that the German localization will simply not have this.

The serious problems are the ones where what is stored is already wrong.

>11 MMcM:

Hmm, tends to ...

Have a look at e.g. Sport zogezegd (*) by Piet Theys.

(*) No Touchstones available, though I do not understand why not.
This book is meant: Sport zogezegd.

As you can see, this was a manual entry by me at September 17, 2006. LT knows this one single copy only. Still, it capitalised the work title--i.e. : turned the title "Sport zogezegd" into "Sport Zogezegd". Why? Nobody asked to do so--on the contrary. Still, that 's what happened.

Have a look at my tags, too. They are: "Vlaamse Pockets, VP106, stukjes, sport".

The first one is the series name; the second is the sequential number within that series; third and fourth tags are descriptive--they are in Dutch. Hey, the book is in Dutch too. (People understanding Dutch will see its title has a word game in it.)

Now, looking at the work page, one can see LT has altered the tags. No more "Vlaamse Pockets, VP106, stukjes, sport", as I chose, but "sports(1) stukjes(1) Vlaamse Pockets(1) VP106(1)" instead. (Making bold is LT's, though it comes in handy now.)

For whatever reason, LT has turned "sport" into "sports". The may be a relict of the earlier possibility to combine tags, a feature that is put on hold now--and right so--though only "for some days", as was put some weeks ago.

Combining tags constitutes a real danger and can and will make a mess of it. LT cannot know what language someone used for tagging--the user might even have chosen to put tags in different languages.

LT cannot help e.g. the word jurisprudence has a different meaning in English than that same word in French. The same tag is the same tag : jurisprudence. But imagine what will happen if tags are combined. Some might know the French word doctrine stands for the English jurisprudence und thus combine both of those. Then, one might know the French jurisprudence stands for the English jurisdiction and thus combine both of those, too.

As it turns out, LT will consider: jurisdiction == jurisprudence == doctrine, which of course if false, though : (en) jurisdiction = (fr) jurisprudence && (en) jurisprudence = (fr) doctrine, but then (en) jurisdiction (en) jurisprudence && (fr) jurisprudence (fr) doctrine. Linked by false twins--which constitute a major problem on their own--combining tags might (and will) make that even non homographic opposites (!) are combined too. This is not only a hornet's nest, but it prepares garantees for disaster.

Thus, seeing LT substitutes my tag for some supposed equivalent (in English), I am not amused. Quite.

Best solution might be for LT to break up existing tag combinations--all of them, that is.

One more example, linking LT's capitalizomania to tag combining : in French, there is quite a difference between "français" (French) and "Français" (French), for the former is a language (spoken in i.a. France, Canada, etc.), while the latter relates to France only. Thus, in French, "le français" is a language, while "le Français" is a Frenchman.

Hmm, all Americans are English, are they?

Happy combining and capitalising. Not.

This is why the absence of the tag combination log (and the ability to separate tags) is so frustrating lately - when users could separate tags it didn't really matter if awful combinations were put together, as they could be easily undone (and if repeatedly put back together, the combiner's name was logged each time so one could always drop a comment to them about it). I've lost count of the number of separations I performed when people got over-zealous about combining imperfect synonyms. A book tagged children's literature is not necessarily a book about children, and vice versa. There are still some combinations lurking that are crying out to be separated...