New tag feature

I've added a new feature that shows tag clouds for LibraryThing.nl, .de, .fr and so forth.*

You can see it at work here: http://www.librarything.nl/work/1059035

Before I can blog it, the two new snippets—"From www.librarything.nl" and "All LibraryThing" will need to be translated. Also, I want to find a good example. So many of the tag clouds are full of English words. That's part of the story—people tagging in English—but if anyone sees a good example, I'd love to see it.

*Strictly speaking, I've called out tags either from users of LibraryThing.nl or on books marked as being in the Dutch language. I'm also not "tag aliasing" so that "histoire" isn't showing up as "history."

Cool feature. As I have a time zone advantage, I took the liberty of making the three translations. I see that "show all tags" cannot be translated.

*is impressed*

Tim:
To find a better example you might try an ad hoc query on the database of Dutch books shared by the most members that selected Dutch in their profile, or French or German, may be they are less bilingual than Dutch.

PS: Why that URL between the ISBN's on the left of the page of this work? I saw the same type of URL also appear in the publication field after KB imports.

It might be a vicious circle to get good examples. You need good examples to attract Dutch-only users, but you need many Dutch-only users to get good examples. May be the following ones are a little better

With http://www.librarything.nl/work/3439 poëzie and klassieken emerge as Ducth tags.

With http://www.librarything.nl/work/21348 keizers and keizertijd emerge but they have a light shade, as if these tags are personal in stead of language bound if I understood the discussion on shading correctly as far as I read it.

With http://www.librarything.nl/work/15945 Psychologie and Wijsbegeerte emerge

hmmm mistake, roman is not just a Dutch category of literature and therefore wasn't a good starting tag for my search. A typical Dutch tag not combined with an English tag applied by many users might be a better starting point to find examples.
wijsbegeerte: 7 users
ah, politiek: 17 users -> http://www.librarything.nl/work/1235946
but it is an English book, a book published in both Dutch and English and in more LibraryThing catalogs would be better.

The request looks easier than it is. I hope I gave others an idea to search an example as I give up. My husband wants dinner (me too) and his shirts ironed.

edited for link to shading

Tonight I'll start translating my tags from English to Dutch. I was going to do that at some point anyway. Now seems a good time for it.

dinners is done, shirts not yet, but...

#6
I think we need a book tagged in Dutch by (half?) a dozen users, also tagged much more frequently in English. Wait...

Got it! the "top books" on http://www.librarything.com/zeitgeist/language/dut has good examples. Tim and others: chime in on a definition what is a really a good example.

Well, I'm not sure, but it's interesting how much of the Dutch tagging is in English. The same holds for French and German too. We need to bust out more!

Well, Tim, most people see the site in English, I guess, so it kind of makes sense to have tags in English. Also, if you have tags in English, you match with a larger group of users. We should have tags in the language the book is in, really.

And what about bilingual users? Or quadrilingual users?

Hi,

I translated my tags into Dutch last night, and ran into trouble whenever I wanted to use the ë. Tags didn't come up, previous tags couldn't be deleted in power edit, that sort of thing. In the end I decided to replace ë bij e, but that looks funny.
Is there any way around this? It's annoying in Dutch, but I expect in French words could get a different meaning from being spelled with an e, é, è or ê.

Xtien: I'm sure that the newcomers use LT.nl and would like to use Dutch tags and to see who else the tags is using.

I still have to get used to the Dutch LT, but since the moment I was a member I have always used Dutch tags. I also wished to see with which other Dutch members I shared a book and I wanted to be able to search Dutch titles in the "Search". Luckily, this is all possible now.

Sure, if I use the tag "royalty" or "comics" I match with a large group. But I (and most people, I guess) want "connections" with Dutch members. Due to translated works (Dutch books combined with the orginal title) I have already "connections" with non-Dutch people.

With all the new features and enchancements the connections with members of the native language are getting more prominent, and I guess this is a wise thing to do. There are Dutch members who can't speak/read/write English not very well, and for those people the Dutch sources, Dutch tags and to see how many Dutch people share your books are important.