01 October 2008

What's in a Woman's Name?

I added players from the 2008 World Women's Championship to my Index of Women Players. On top of the usual challenges with names, women's surnames present a special problem because they often change when the women marry. The only instance I noted for the 2008 event was to equate Tea Bosboom-Lanchava with Lanchava.

I had a few other small problems to sort out. The PGN file from the event used 'Sachdev, T.', but the official crosstable listed 'Tania, Sachdev'. This is a special problem with Indian names, and I'm not sure which variant to use. Perhaps I should use the full name, as I do for Chinese names. This way the search engines can find both names. In any case, I'm certain that I haven't been consistent with the use of Indian names, both men and women, and I should address this in a separate action.

A similar problem arose with PGN: 'Mona, K.' and XTBL: 'Khaled, Mona'. The FIDE card lists 'Mona, Khaled', so I used Mona as the surname.

While I was working on the 2008 list, I noticed a few possible problems from previous events. I have 'Vasilevich I' in the 2006 championship, but 'Vasilevich T' in the 2000 and 2004 events. Are these two different players or has a mistake been introduced? Ditto for 'Sakhatova E' in the 1995 Interzonal, and 'Sakhatova G' in the 1985 and 1987 Interzonals.

2 comments:

ejh said...

I recall that the Penguin Classics edition I read nearly thirty years ago insisted on calling Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenin on the grounds that it was a translation into English and therefore the name should be rendered without the feminine suffix -a that it possesses in Russian.

Pure Waste said...

Don't miss out the greatest chess game of this year! Kramnik, the World Chess Champion of 2006, will be trying to regain the title from Anand, who took it over in 2007.
The chess board will be fight arena, and chess pieces will move along like warriors! You can predict here, who the winner will be - http://www.votetheday.com/top-events-42/world-chess-championship---318