A bug when automatically extracting English reference information from Chinese references?

heguangm

I noticed that recently Zotero has a great feature: I added Chinese references to my article with a Chinese national standard style because earlier I targeted my paper for a Chinese journal. Then I changed my mind to switch to an English journal, so I have to choose APA the English journal requires - for sure it requires all Chinese references to be translated into English.

All the Chinese references do have the English version for title, authors, journal names, .... but not in Zotero when importing, I am sure.

However, the magic happens when I switched the reference styles to the APA - all the references at the end of my paper were changed to English version! Must be done by Zotero!

The only issue is that the citations in the text are still Chinese!

So I thought this is a bug? isn't it?

Thanks,

Guangming

adamsmith

I'm not aware of any Zotero functionality that would do this at all -- do you have any add-ons installed?

heguangm

I noticed that they were translated into Chinese automatically - not a function of zotero?

I am confident that Zotero did not get the English version of references from Chinese papers, many of which do have English at least of title, author names, journal names, abstract, ... (Many Chinese journals require this.)

This is very interesting. I am curious how citation styles in general, and Zotero specifically handle this two versions of reference information?

thanks,

heguangm

sorry be translated from Chinese to English automatically.

dstillman

No, Zotero has no built-in language translation functionality.

heguangm

yes, you are right. Figured out that someone used some software to translate the references part but not the citation, and also lost the reference connections to the database!