Greek classics, multiple translated titles ?

glorieux-f

Philologic tradition for ancient texts may be long. Original texts may have no titles and may be known by a Latin title forged in the medieval ages. What should be the best way to record this title tradition in Zotero ?

A real life example, the full works of Galen :
 — bibliography (and texts) https://galenus-verbatim.huma-num.fr/#urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0057.tlg001
— the public zotero group https://www.zotero.org/groups/4571007/galenus-verbatim/collections/EEF8L3QT/items/Z5LEH4EC/collection

Title: Exhortatio ad medicinam – Protrepticus
Short Title: Protr.
[Extra]
Original Title: Προτρεπτικὸς ἐπ’ ἰατρικήν
French Title: Exhortation à l’étude de la médecine
English Title: Exhortation to Study the Arts
English Short Title: Protr.

“Original title” (in greek) is encoded in Extra field like advised in multiple places in this forum. The field name do not give the lang information, but this could probably inferred from the Language field. Other titles follow the naming policy in the Extra field, but this convention seems not the best to be extended (german, italian, arabic…). We are wondering, is a convention like this following zotero style ?

Title [fr]: Exhortation à l’étude de la médecine
Title [en]: Exhortation to Study the Arts
Short Title [en]: Protr.
Title [de]: …

bwiernik

If it’s just for recording purposes and not something you would want to see in a citation, then putting the additional languages in Extra is the best option.

If you need to be able to cite all of these languages, that’s not supported by Zotero. It is supported by Juris-M, a third party offshoot of Zotero designed for legal and multilingual citation, but Juris-M’s development has been slow lately due to its developer’s other obligations.

glorieux-f

Because this library is public, and will be copied by other groups, Juris-M is not an option (and I guess it’s not a big problem to write a style using those fields). My problem is more, what should be the right names in Extra field for those translated titles ? If some people rely on those names for some code, they will not be happy if the names are changing because they were not chosen carefully. For example I’m wondering, are square brackets [lang] a bad practice for those names ?

bknorn

You could still use Juris-M for writing the localized titles into the database and sync it with zotero.org. The database will be compatible with the Zotero clients of other users. The localized fields will appear in the "Extra" field of the web library and of the Zotero clients like that:

mlzsync1:0248{"multifields":{"main":{},"_keys":{"title":{"en":"Exhortation to Study the Arts","de":"Protrepticus"},"shortTitle":{"en":"Protr."}}},"multicreators":{"0":{"_key":{"de":{"firstName":"","lastName":"Galen"},"en":{"firstName":"","lastName":"Galen"}}}}}

This is not very reader friendly, but everybody working with a Juris-M client would be able to use the localized titles for creating complex multilingual citations without writing new styles etc.

glorieux-f

I’ve tested Jurism, interesting, but it’s not exactly the model for ancient classics. I guess this app could be very useful in the context of an international organisation, where translations of a text has comparable status, reason why languages should be declared before to have parallel bibliographies. Our need is closer to the librarian model of translated titles of a same work, with same author(s).
https://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/bd242.html

Jurism give an example of a complex encoding in Extra field, allowing us freedom to define a specification. Thanks for your piece of code, it’s not the full solution for us, but it makes us to think more about our problem.