Finding out titles of creative works in different languages

Factual Questions
1

Not sure if this isn’t possibly better suited for IMHO, so if any mods feel that way, please move accordingly.

Basically, there’s a problem I face rather often when attempting to follow up on recommendations I’ve gleaned either from posts in this forum or elsewhere on the net, and that is that it’s sometimes surprisingly hard to find out what title a work of some kind was released under in different languages (for instance, in German). This seems especially difficult for books, (for movies, IMDb often works well enough, though the reverse case can be difficult – if I only know the German title, it often slogs out a host of vaguely-related results for me to slog through) – some strategies I’ve employed in the past are finding the wiki page for a book (if one exists), and checking to see whether a page exists in another language, or googling up the author’s bibliography in two different languages and matching the books according to their descriptions (which can be rather hard with authors that tend to write about similar or related themes, in non-fiction especially); in some cases, it’s difficult even to find out whether or not a certain work even has been translated yet. Short stories also are pretty intractable.

So, what I’m asking for is some resource, or alternatively, some strategy, that helps me better to find those translated titles – something where you could just enter the title and it gives you the different translations would be optimal, but really, given the frustrating inefficiency of my current methods, pretty much any idea is going to help.

2

One strategy is to find the Wikipedia page for the work, then see if there is a link to a wiki page in the language that interests you. For example,

is linked to dozens of other pages in other languages, e.g.,

which tells you that ハリー・ポッターと賢者の石 is the Japanese title.

Anther place to go is Worldcat.org, which is built up from library catalogue records. There, the record for HP1 is:
http://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=harry+potter+philosopher's+stone
and that has a way to limit by language, so the Japanese HP1 records are at:
http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=harry+potter+philosopher's+stone&dblist=638&fq=ln%3Ajpn&qt=facet_ln%3A

3

If your case really is english/german, once you have the author’s name you can look for books by him in amazon.de

If you’re interested in specific genres, figure out which editorial companies focus on them and bookmark their webpages.

4

The Library of Congress cataloging system includes an entry for “uniform title.” In most cases, it’s the original title in the original language. For example, for the novel Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann, the uniform title is Vermessung der Welt. You can search the LoC catalog here (find the uniform title under “full record”). Unfortunately, they don’t catalog many books published outside the U.S. Once you know the original title in the original language, I second Giles’ idea of searching WorldCat. You can learn, for example, learn that the French title is Les arpenteurs du monde : roman

5

You could use LibraryThing. Here for instance is the details page for Alistair McLean’s Force 10 from Navarone with titles in Dutch, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish and Swedish, which I found by searching on the Norwegian title. You’re limited to what other users have added, but it’s a popular site, so you’ll probably get a fairly decent success rate.

6

Sorry to the respondents for abandoning the thread, I had some other stuff to attend to. Thanks for the responses, Worldcat, LibraryThing and the LoC all look like resources worth checking out.

Any ideas for the short-story problem?

7

Any proper library catalogue done in one of the major languages will have a rule for the uniform title. In German, for example, it’s called “Einheitssachttitel”, abbreviated on on the entry to EST and in the books front page often as “Einheitssacht.” So searching in a library catalogue - for Germany, there’s the KVK, you can select all of Germany with one klick (for Bavaria, there’s the Gateway). So when you enter the original title and author, you will get both the original edition and the various translations.

It depends on which language and country the book appeared first in: each big country has a national library that collects everything that is published in that country. For the US, it’s the LoC, for UK the British Library, for Germany, DDB, for France etc. See my link for KVK, it has little country flags with links. The title of the original language edition is the Uniform title. So you look there first to find that, and then use it for looking for the translations.

However, because publishers are bastards, before the 80s, the information is not always given inside the book. It simply says “translated from the english by …” but not the title of the original work. Or a publisher will take a handful of stories from the first book, a handful from the second book, a few from the third book, and give them a completly new title (happens with James Herriots vet books). They may or may not list which original books the stories were taken from, but it still makes buying a book a gamble if the stories are already contained in a different volume with another title you already have at home.

Also, publishers think readers are idiots, esp. with books aimed at children, and edit wildly, without ever giving a notice. So you want to read Swifts biting satire in the land of the talking horses, so you get Gullivers travels … and it only contains the first two journeys, with all the stuff at the royal court in the land of the midget people cut out.
I have a translation of Hornblower at home where a whole chapter at the end - when he catches a disease- is completly missing, with no mention that it was edited at all. Just sucks.
And no librarians don’t have the time to read each book from cover to cover, so if it’s not written on the front page, we can’t put it on the library catalogue entry.

As for finding short stories - that’s generally a tricky bit, in any language, because like poetry, listing a dozen stories or more in a collection would take ages to write the entry, so librarians don’t. Wikipedia might help, or Google books, with their scans. Today, more and more publishers offer a scan of the TOC along with the CIP (Cataloguing in print - the national library gets the catalogue data from the publisher in digital format while the book is being published), so that makes searching easier, but that doesn’t apply to old books.