Hebrew problems - summery

hillel

1. missing item type: scientific edition of old books. It doesn't fit into just a 'book' since it has an author and an editor, but in Hebrew there are two kinds of editor. The first is the same named עורך and the 2nd is called מהדיר whuch is the editor af the scientific edition or semi-scientific edition.
2. in all styles – editors appear as ed. (in English) instead of עורך in Hebrew.
3. no Hebrew styles !!
4. Big problem of Hebrew dates as in Hebrew publications one has to give only the Hebrew year.
5. the brackets problem. see http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/12578/brackets-in-hebrew/#Item_3

if someone can help - blessed be he...

bdarcus

So, you need to explain more a few of these ...

1. it doesn't follow this needs a new type. Can you expand more on the editor distinction you note? I believe we've heard about similar distinctions in French, but am not exactly sure this is the same.
2. so then the translation file for Hebrew needs updating
3. what does this mean, and how you going to help resolve it? The existing styles were created by people who donated their labor in some form to helping getting them written.
4. don't know what this means. Assume you're talking to people who know nothing about Hebrew, dates or otherwise.

adamsmith

1. sounds similar to what people from France have been saying. Apparently, in some languages/academic traditions there is a distinction between, say, the "editor" of a critical edition of The Wealth of Nations and the "editor" of a collection of articles - there are different terms for the two functions (which in English are both editors). So what's needed here is not so much another item type as another author type - I don't have time to find this discussion for French academica, I believe Gracile explained this in some detail.

3. While generally this applies to style requests:
http://www.zotero.org/support/requesting%2520styles
for languages that use non-Latin fonts you might have to find someone who is able to write Hebrew (or Chinese/Japanes/Arabic etc.) to write the style. At least for me, dealing with letters/symbols I don't recognize is just too much work. It's not that hard, though.

4. I believe ajlyon has explored different calendars and years some - I think the consensus was that this isn't something that's going to be possible to resolve in any reasonable way anytime soon.

Rintze

@1: for this CSL 1.0 includes a dedicated "editorial-director" role.

ajlyon

@4: Calendar conversions are not currently in the scope of Zotero, but this is a known issue. Hijra, pre-Meiji, and Old Style dates are part of the same issue -- but this won't happen for a while.

In most cases, you should be able to simply enter the Hebrew date as such and the style should handle it fine. That will make things like sorting a mess, but that's about all we can do for now.

Maybe expanded locale support for fields like date will happen in Frank's next big project. :)

hillel

Thanks to all.
1. Adamsmith explained the problem well. But I didn't understand Rintze's answer.
2. How can I change q fix (can I ?) the Hebrew translation file?
3. I really want to add some Hebrew styles. I tried and I'll try again… the 'step by step' explanation wasn't so easy for me. I'd like to know if somebody else tried and maybe we can collaborate

Rintze

Zotero uses the Citation Style Language (CSL) to format citations and bibliographies. Zotero 2.1 uses CSL 1.0, which supports two different types of editors (editor and editorial-director).

I'm not sure if you can select "editorial-director" in the Zotero interface already as a creator type, but in principe your case should be coverable with CSL 1.0 styles.

See http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles for a background on CSL.

hillel

thanks. Ill look into it.
Do u know how to fix a translation file?

Rintze

http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/localization#csl_styles