[open-bibliography] FRBR examples

Thu May 27 14:36:09 UTC 2010

On 10-05-27 15:14, Rob Styles wrote:
>> If I read Mann's Magic Mountain in English,
>> and you read it in the original German, we could still have a
>> conversation about what we liked and disliked about the book (Work).
>> We read the same Work, but in different expressions.
>>     
> In common parlance people would generally say they had read the same "book" which is one of the problems. If you need an unambiguous term then perhaps you could say you had read the same story. There are many aspects that will be common and certainly the translation is not as noteworthy as the original work, but the translation is a creative work in its own right (as any translator will tell you).
>   

Maybe a translation is actually derived from a particular
expression/manifestation since
human translators have no access to the work qua work and probably had a
physical
copy or item that they were working from, though which this is they may
rarely tell us
(nor whether a coffee stain obliterated most of the text on the bottom
of page 53 which
is why their fidelity wavers there).

I would agree that a translation is a work in its own right, as might be
a particularly
inspired musical performance particularly with musical styles that place
an emphasis
on improvisation -- listening to two jazz musicians playing the same
tune in two different
settings you might be hard pressed to assert that they were making
manifest their
expressions of the same work rather than expressing two different works
derived from
a common source.

I guess the reason we were initially considering a FRBR-like
representation was that
it would be helpful as a standard to facilitate interoperability of
data. But I am beginning
to gather that it is not a widely implemented standard despite having
been around for
more than a decade and doesn't seem to map well onto most people's
notions of the real
world...

Hmmm...

-w

-- 
William Waites           <william.waites at okfn.org>
Mob: +44 789 798 9965    Open Knowledge Foundation
Fax: +44 131 464 4948                Edinburgh, UK