How to stop Chicago Style capitalizing Latin titles

rgouldin
Here is the citation generated by Chicago Manual of Style (full note) from an item in my database:

Tanner, R.C.H. “Nathaniel Torporley’s ‘Congestor Analyticus’ and Thomas Harriot’s ‘De Triangulis Laterum Rationalium’.” Annals of Science 34, no. 4 (1977): 393–428.

My Title field for that entry is: Nathaniel Torporley's ‘Congestor analyticus’ and Thomas Harriot's ‘De triangulis laterum rationalium’

You'll notice, in the Zotero-generated citation, that the two Latin titles embedded in the article title have Title Case. They are names of early-modern mathematical treatises, and should only have the first letter capitalized (Turabian, 6th ed., 4.11: "In Latin ... capitalize the first word and all proper nouns and proper adjectives thereafter" - in these titles, there are no words that should be capitalized after the first word).

Is there, at least, a work-around that I can use to stop Zotero from capitalizing these words, or do I have to edit the citations manually?
  • RintzeRintze
    Set the value of the "Language" field of the item to "la" (to indicate Latin). Items for which the Language field value starts with anything other than "en" are exempt from title casing.
  • rgouldin
    Thank you - that did it!
  • margot
    How does one do that? (setting the value of the title field to a different language). I have the same problem with titles of books in Romance languages. Thanks!
  • fbennett
    Just click on the field and enter a value. It's best to use the standard ISO language abbreviations. You can find a list here.
  • margot
    edited November 29, 2012
    Thank you fbennett. Excuse my ignorance, but by "field" do you mean the Title box in Zotero? Or is there a different "behind the scenes" section somewhere?
  • fbennett
    It looks like this: http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/5306/languagee.png
  • margot
    Brilliant! Thank you so much!!!!!
  • margot
    Sorry, a quick follow up. It seems to work well with titles but it's still capitalising the journal title as if it were English (as in Revista Española De Historia rather than Revista Española de Historia). Is there a way around that? Thanks again for your help.
  • fbennett
    The behaviour could be extended to cover journal titles, but we should confirm first:

    Does anyone know of languages or styles where this would cause problems?
  • RintzeRintze
    edited November 29, 2012
    Is there any variation between styles in how journal titles should be rendered? Title casing probably shouldn't be used in styles if it's just to fix up bad data (e.g. journal titles imported in lower case).
  • fbennett
    True. But even if journal titles can be passed through untouched, that still leaves book titles on the chapter type, which are also CSL "container-title". That makes me think it might be best to extend the behaviour to cover that as well as "title". Is there a strong reason not to?
  • RintzeRintze
    I don't see how that could hurt. (it needs to be documented in the CSL spec, though)
  • adamsmith
    oh yes - this definitely needs to cover container-title.

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