The use of "fr" on the date line...

poirmw

I was under the impression that if I placed "fr" on the language line, then the entire entry would be treated as if it were a French footnote or bibliographic entry. But it appears that this may not be the case as regards the date line. I've entered "26 janvier 1978" on the date line, and when I bring that entry into a footnote, the date gets translated into English. Is there a way in which I can preserve the French date in an otherwise English paper and/or bibliography? The paper title, which is in French, as well as the diacritical marks survive the transfer to the footnote area at the bottom of the page, but the date does not. It appears as "January 26, 1978". I am using the Chicago Manual of Style (full note).

fbennett

Do you want to have all dates in French, or only those of French entries? It is possible to implement a style with mixed locales, but it's not yet officially supported; all I would be able to do is point you at some documents about how it can be done. You probably don't want to go there unless you really have to.

adamsmith

I was under the impression that if I placed "fr" on the language line, then the entire entry would be treated as if it were a French footnote or bibliographic entry.

See fbennett for the details, but FYI: currently the only thing the "fr" changes is the fact that the title won't be converted to English "title case".

fbennett

To get all dates in French, you can change the bibliographyLocale setting.

poirmw

In reply to fbennett: Only those that are French entries. Here is an example of what I mean:

Oscar Cullmann, “Jésus-Christ a-t-il eu des visées politique?,” L’Église canadienne XI, no. 10 (January 26, 1978): 305–313.

The actual date in the database entry is: 26 janvier 1978. As you can see, it looks and feels rather strange, ...particularly so in Québec where things like that are immediately noticed.

In reply to Adam Smith: Yes, but I also noticed that the journal name also remained in French, so I presumed that the date would too, and that I might be doing something incorrectly to get the date I was getting. That made sense, it seemed to me. Right? ;-)

Thanks.

fbennett

Ok. Here is some documentation on multilingual CSL layouts. In your case, you would not need to define separate layouts for English and French; just move all of the code within the citation layout to a macro (say, "render-citation") and the same for the bibliography (say, "render-bibliography"). Then call the macro from inside the layout sections in the way described in the document.

The modified style will not validate against the CSL 1.0 schema, but assuming the style is valid otherwise, it will work. You'll also want to change the name and ID of the style, so it doesn't get clobbered when you refresh the original style in Zotero. There are instructions on that here.

poirmw

Thank you for the suggestion above. I am not sure if I know how to make these modifications, but I'll try. If I cannot get it to work, I won't waste time on it. I'll simply modify the text in the footnote and/or bibliography as need be. Again, thank you.