Translate author wasn't added automatically

sugi2000

Hi, I enjoyed Zotero very much. Thank you.

I have a little trouble when I import from Amazon Japan website.
The translate author information wasn't added automatically.
So I have to input traslate author manually.
I appreciate if Zotero could detect traslate author information.

adamsmith

amazon tends to produce entries that aren't very clean - it is, after all, a book-seller and not a library. If possible, you could use worldcat instead?
Also - translate author - do you mean the translator (e.g. when you have a book by Faulkner you'd
Author: Faulkner, William
Translator: Personwho, Translatedfaulkner )

sugi2000

Thank you.
Yes, I meant a translate author as the person who translated a book into Japanese.

I tried Worldcat.
It's great.
I want to import Japanese characters, but Zotero imported alphabet characters only.

In Japan, NACSIS Webcat is also useful catalog.
I hope Zotero could import Webcat information.
http://webcat.nii.ac.jp/webcat_eng.html

Worldcat result:
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/47601729
Webcat result (same book):
http://webcat.nii.ac.jp/cgi-bin/eng/shsproc?id=BA37656058

ryuuchiba

I import Japanese characters into Zotero all the time on both mac and pc. And I haven't had any trouble with Amazon Japan.

sugi2000

Thank you.
No, I haven't had any trouble with Amazon Japan either.

My Problems are:
1) I cannot import a translate author name with Amazon Japan.
2) I cannot import Japanese characters with Worldcat.

fbennett

It looks like WorldCat drops content that is enclosed in tags with class "vernacular", which seems mean anything not in the interface language. I don't see an option to switch the interface to Japanese, so this is a problem.

Zotero doesn't have multi-lingual layers yet, so there isn't a clean way of handling this. But if the original is in Japanese, it seems to me that there should be a means of capturing that content. Maybe this would be a good time to think about interim storage conventions for multi-lingual content. Would something like:
<original text> [<english_translation>] [<transliteration>]
be better?

sugi2000

That's good idea.
I hope Zotero would capture original text for multi-lingual content.

timtak

I would be grateful of the ability to capture from Webcat too. It is a very popular Japanese citation index, the most popular after CiNii perhaps.

adamsmith

URL?

fbennett

Would also like to have NACSIS Webcat. If no one gets to it, it will be in my sights as the mutlilingual/law project (MLZ) matures (sometime during the summer is likely). We can capture multiple languages in MLZ now, so a full-service translator should be possible.

The NDL also needs doing -- Jonathan Lewis posted a translator to zotero-dev back before the files area went away, and I've been unable to secure a copy anywhere, so that one will need to be rewritten, I guess.

DWL-SDCA

One more thing about WorldCat: their non-Latin characters aren't necessarily encoded the way their server "says" they are; same with WorldCat FirstSearch.

adamsmith

I thought we fixed the encoding issues with worldcat (at least with firstsearch) a while ago - do you have an example?

DWL-SDCA

I'll find examples and provide them in 24-36 hours.

adamsmith

I had a look at the NACSIS webcat - I don't see how we can do that reasonably well - there is no metadata anywhere and the item display looks too unreliable to parse well - maybe Frank has a better idea, but I'm not going to try this.

fbennett

Oh. That's not good, maybe we won't go there.

Had I thought things through, I would have realised that must be the case. You'll enjoy the back-story. Japanese national universities, which (apart from the NDL) are the backbone of the library system here, have been divided into spheres of interest, each associated with one of the electronics majors. Ours is Fujitsu, I believe; other elements of the system have other caretakers. One side effect of this is that our Uni (and, I suppose although I don't know, other institutions) uses bespoke software in some of its core systems including (drumroll) the metadata standard used by the library. So it makes sense (from a supplier perspective) that NACSIS Webcat would not provide a clean channel for converting records from the local meta-lingo into something more generic.

Times will change. Meanwhile I'll keep my hopes on the NDL.

adamsmith

there is webcatplus - which is a hideous webpage and doesn't have an English version, but that looks like it might work a little better (though nothing like marc export or the like).