Have an Editable list of languages.

max1836

When using automagical input, English is sometimes input as:
EN
English
en
eng

These choices seem to be the same under the covers. But how about having a list of languages that Zotero recognizes? Entries in the list would be:

English (EN, en, eng)
French (fr)
German (ger)

So any items imported automagically which define "Language" as "EN" or "eng" would get transformed to "English".

max1836

The annoyance is that when entering langauges manually, then "EN', "English", "en", and "eng" are all presented as choices. I just want "English".

So I create and "Advanced Search' to find "EN", "en", and "eng" and fix them manually. You also have to clean out trash since these might have the abbreviations too...

dstillman

We've talked in the past about some sort of mechanism for switching between a drop-down and a free-form field, but just forcing certain abbreviations to canonical language names and/or overriding the autocomplete isn't a bad idea. I'll let fbennett and others, who better know the requirements here in terms of citation processing, comment.

max1836

I'm really talking about just canonicalizing language names for automatic input. So if Zotero is automatically inputing a journal article for example which has the language specified as "EN", then Zotero would look in the file (which I can edit) and see that my preferred choice is "English".

Of course you're free to clean up more :-)

dstillman

We're saying the same things.

aurimas

For reference, some of the relevant discussion starts here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/27282/incorrect-capitalization-in-chicago-with-multilingual/?Focus=143792#Comment_143792
Then there's Dan's comment here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3252/please-documentexplain-the-use-of-the-language-field/#Item_5

But basically, the idea is to standardize the language field and only offer the RFC 4646 notation. So en-EN is preferred over English.

max1836

aurimas - Thank you very much for the insight.

Nice thing about standards, there are so many from which to choose. :-)

I understand your point, but en-EN are computer codes. I am a Hew-Man. I'd like to read "English" on the screen instead of some computer code. So my preferences would be to set the visual display so that:

en -> English
EN -> English

If typing "E" "n" "tab" gets swizzled to "English" as input so much the better. It seem that when only one choice is left in the drop down list that "tab" ought to select that choice and go to the next field. (Not sure how this conforms to entry filed with drop down conventions. Been a while since I studied UI standards...)

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The nice feature of course in using the two letter code is that the "language" column in the center Zotero panel would be narrower.