[Koha] Translation problems

[Steve/Ollie/Steven F. Baljkas]

Monday, May 17, 2004      15:15 CDT

Hi, Christian,

Sorry to hear about all the translation troubles you are encountering. It does make me feel a bit better (Schadefreude ;-) ) that I haven't yet been able to get the graphics you sent working. I haven't given up, but it is looking increasingly likely that there will be at least a dozen (the 'hollow' ones) that I won't be able to do.

As for your questions and Paul's responses, if there is a separate Deutsche MARC (sorry, silly pun), and you need to compare UNIMARC and MARC21 to it to determine which is a better fit, focus on the following fields: 100 (Personal Author Main Entry) and 245 (Title and Statement of Responsibility). If the majority of your records have information in those fields, you will want MARC21.

I think Paul is most certainly right about the system parameters setup being workable in English. I mean, obviously, you don't have a problem with working in English and it seems to be a given nowadays for tech-competent people globally. As Paul suggested, it is really not something folks working with Koha will have to deal with daily anyway.

> Are there any suggestions on what words to include in a German stopwords 
> list? (I know I should ask that on the German Koha list, but it seems to 
> be dead.)

As for this, your university's librarians should have a complete list, but for the time being you can always start with the initial articles to ignore list: various versions exist online (derived from the Library of Congress' Subject Cataloguing Manual: Shelflisting), the one I have from formal studies was from an expired link to
URL <http:///weber.u.washington.edu/~acqdiv/acq/articles.html>, the same list given by LC online at
URL <http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/bdapp-e.html>.

You can safely omit (at least for the time being) words from languages for which you know your library has no representative works (z.B. ka, or ke, from Hawaiian). Otherwise begin with German articles, and add any prepositions, verbs and conjunctions commonly omitted. I don't believe this is a problem for other languages as it is for English: the example in library training that I still remember was the pain of trying to search for works on the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, all of the words therein being stop words in English. Do let us know how that works out.

Hope this helps a bit. I will have results for you on the image translations by Friday, one way or the other.

Tschüß,
Steven F. Baljkas
library tech at large
Koha neophyte
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada