original language / translated from

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Hi,

How to state the language a a book is translated from ?

Many books (most I know of) usually state in the first pages :
- the original title
- the translator
- the language it translated from

I was surprised to see that there was no space for such an important information in epub2 large array of roles and contributors.

Can you tell me how it has to be specified in epub3 ?

I am sure that with the correct properties, software like Calibre could take advantage to sort a library by original language.

Thank you for your help

François

Just my ideas about this:

That someone is the translator you can put in a machine readable form into the OPF file,
using a meta element with the corresponding role for the author or contributor (the method to do this is different in EPUB 2 and 3, but possible for both)
You can provide more than one title with language indication, but this is only useful, if there is content in this language within the book, for example if it contains different language versions.

An idea to indicate a relation to another document is to use a DCMI term like relation as metainformation within the OPF.

Obviously you can always use description or coverage to note some more prose about the book and further relations, but this is not necessarily machine readable or as flexible as RDF is.
But of course, there is no problem as well to use another vocabulary. You can use your prefix for advanced property values of meta elements, if you need.
Obviously due to the low quality of implementation, just one cannot assume, that viewers interpret much of the metadata within an EPUB book, machine readable or not - but in theory, if you markup it properly using more advanced vocabularies, advanced and interested programs can extract such information, if they exist - if not, you can write them ;o)

EPUB 3 allows to use properties from other vocabularies, EPUB 2 does not exclude to use other metadata, for example DCMI terms within the OPF-file.

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