How to catalog material in another language without translating titles or names is everyday work for a museum, a picture gallery or a photo library that works with foreign reference cards. The card from an international museum, the catalogue raisonné of a collection, the label that arrived with the piece in English or in French: that material describes the object with precision, but in a language other than the catalog that will receive it. Translating it whole looks like the obvious answer, and that is exactly where the problems start.
Not everything a card says should be translated. Descriptive vocabulary —object type, technique, material, subject— should: “oil on canvas” means the same in any catalog, and translating it makes the piece findable for whoever searches in the catalog’s language. The title of the work, people’s names, dates, inscriptions on the piece and identifiers are not vocabulary: they are data that identify the object and connect it to its provenance. Translating them does not clarify them; it disconnects them.
Image and card are combined in From the image and the catalog card to the record. This text is about what happens when that card is not in the catalog’s language.
Why a translated title is lost
If a work is cataloged at its home institution as Water Lilies and our record stores it only as Nenúfares, the link to that source breaks. Whoever later wants to match the piece against the catalog that holds it will search for Water Lilies and will not find it. The title is, among other things, a search key outward; translating it disables that key.
Collect keeps the title in its original form and stores the translation apart, as an alternative title, marked as a translation and in which language. That is the practice the standards themselves already provide for. In MARC, the original title stays in its field and the parallel form is recorded in its own, without overwriting the first. In CDWA, the preferred title remains in its original form and the translation enters the set of titles as an entry marked as translated, with its language. Collect generates that entry from the original instead of replacing it, and preserves the alternative titles the card already brought —former ones, variants— without merging them with the new translation.
What is translated and what is protected
Collect’s translation is selective: it acts on descriptive-vocabulary fields and leaves identifying fields alone.
- Translated: the vocabulary that describes: object type or class, technique and materials, subject terms, classification by discipline, descriptive notes in prose. These are the fields where the term in the catalog’s language helps retrieve the piece.
- Left untouched: the title of the work, proper names of people and bodies, dates, inscriptions and legends that appear on the object, and identifiers —inventory numbers, call numbers, reference codes.
Proper names deserve a note. Translating a surname or domesticating a given name introduces exactly the kind of variant cataloging tries to avoid: the same person written two ways and ending up as two entries in the index. That is why names are left as they come; their normalization is a separate problem, that of authority control, not of translation. Inscriptions on the piece —a signature, an engraved date, a dedication— are part of the physical object and are transcribed as they stand; a translated inscription stops being a transcription and becomes an interpretation.
Translation with context, not word for word
Translating cataloging vocabulary is not the same as translating prose. The same term can mean different things according to the kind of holding: “plate” is a plate in an illustrated edition and a plaque in another context. Collect’s translation is contextual: it resolves the term according to the field it appears in and the type of material, not as a fixed dictionary substitution. That reduces the coarser errors, the ones that come from translating a word without looking at where it sits. Reducing is not eliminating.
Limits
Automatic translation of vocabulary has error, and the error does not disappear for being contextual. There are domain-technical terms —of conservation, of artistic techniques, of documentary typologies— whose correct translation depends on a convention that varies among institutions and traditions. There the system proposes a translation, but the decision remains with whoever catalogs and knows the vocabulary of their institution. Selective translation takes on the mechanical work —the bulk of vocabulary terms, which repeat— so that review concentrates on the cases that do need judgment.
Collect distinguishes descriptive vocabulary from identifying data by field, and that distinction decides what is translated and what is not. It is a rule for the standard formats the system handles; it does not guess intentions. If a card uses a field for something other than its usual purpose, that field’s classification governs. That is why the translated alternative title is delivered as a reviewable proposal, not as closed data. An inferred or translated fact is not presented as verified.
To continue the conversation
If your institution works with reference cards in other languages —from international museums, foreign collections, documentation that arrived with the piece— and you are concerned that translation will break the connection with the original source, write to us at info@janium.com. We want to understand what material you work with and how you describe it today.