Talk:Tales of the Black Widow Company

Foreign-Language Editions

Context: I am working to unformize the formatting of foreign-language edition notes across various product and novel pages. A pattern for novels seems to have been worked out. See Warrior: En Garde#Foreign-Language Editions for an example. Now I am examining product pages.

This particular product page is indicative of an issue that will arise with several product pages. There is an existing section called "German Edition" with a substantial amount of content. (See Technical Readout: 3025 for antoher example.) It seems wise to use this page as a plan prototype before continuing to others.

My idea/proposal (for this and other similar pages) would be twofold:

(i) lower the section level of "German edition" and its subsections by one and put this under a section called "Foreign-Language Editions", and

(ii) rename the section from "German Edition" to "German".

So all content will be preserved, this is simply modifying the section structure and names.

I have already done step (i) to this article, but not step (ii). I don't see any functional issues with step (i). A small potential issue with (ii) is that renaming the section may neccessiatate some effort in link renaming. In the longterm, it would be best to have a consistent section/subsection naming structure to refer to specific language sections foir wiki-links. So, before diving in too much further it seemed wise to get input on foreign-language section structure using this article as a sample.

Please feel free to share thoughts whetehr to approve or revise this plan. --Dude RB (talk) 00:18, 18 June 2022 (EDT)

I have no real opinion regarding your plan, and am fine with it. Just a word of explanation regarding the German translation though: I don't know other translations, but I know that the German translation by FanPro is special because there is almost no product that wasn't tweaked, changed, updated, revised or otherwise fiddled with in translation. I wasn't initially aware of this and only realized it when I got my hands on the original (english language) material as I fell down the Sarna rabbit hole.

But while the German editions were definitely different, I felt they didn't warrant their own article, being just a translation of the original canonical material with (non-canonical or at best apocryphal) changes; at the same time, the changes were sometimes significant enough that I felt they deserved to be mentioned. Thus, I inserted subsections into articles where I gave details on the German edition and the changes that they made in it for a given product. (Particularly egregious examples would be TRO:3026, the Solaris VII boxed set, and the five original housebooks that were rearranged into two thicker volumes.)

I think what then happened a decade down the line is that Pserratv started working on the Spanish edition, and used the treatment of the German edition as a template. I believe he wasn't aware of the special status of the German material and that it wasn't merely a straight translation. Subsequently, other languages were also included... and now we are where we are. I don't know enough about the other foreign language editions to tell if these, too, contain substantial changes. If they don't, I reckon they don't really require an in-depth coverage here. Frabby (talk) 06:10, 18 June 2022 (EDT)