Translated books repeat translator in MLA style

philosopherdog · July 31, 2008

Hi,
I grabbed a translated work from Library of Congress. The problem is that when output it to MLA I get the following, even though the "author" field only contains one entry, namely the translator:

Mills, Laurence-Khantipalo, tran. Dhammapada = The Path of Truth. Trans. Laurence-Khantipalo Mills. Bangkok: Mahamakut Press, 1977.

Notice the trans. appears twice. Any chance someone could fix MLA style and repost it so that this could be solved?

Tjowens · July 31, 2008

It looks like the problem only occurs when a work has only a translator. The MLA translator is wedging in the translator for a second time in place of the author. Can you point our a example of what should happen in this case? Is the translator supposed to appear in the author spot for sorting? Or, is the title of the work supposed to be what it is sorted by for MLA?

philosopherdog · August 6, 2008

Hi,
Thanx for the response. I see that this is a bit of an anomalous case. I think that given the book in question has no "author" as such, I think the MLA would show the title, followed by the translator, although I can't specifically see where this is covered in the manual. But you can surmise this from the presentation of works without authors and also the way they treat editor and translator info as coming after the title.