Multi-lingual styles and date-format

haraldkliems

The problems discussed in this thread have led me to investigate the functionality of using English-language styles with non-English output languages in general.

While the localization via the Babelzilla-files in general works quite well, one big problem seems to be the date format: If you set "extensions.zotero.export.bibliographyLocale" to "de-DE" and then create bibliographies in any given standard style, they always get the date wrong -- "November 18, 2002" instead of "18. November 2002".

I don't know much about CSL and so I was wondering if, in principle, this problem can be fixed, i. e. a style would use a date format based on the bibliographyLocale entry. It would be great if this would work, since in practice the wrong dates make a style mostly useless and thus necessitate the creation of language-specific styles.

erazlogo

Unfortunately in English dates can be formatted in different ways for different styles: 18 Nov. 2002; 18 November 2002; or November 18, 2002. As a result, many styles define precisely where the day and month are displayed and whether the month is abbreviated or not. It doesn't seem possible to localize all these cases in CSL.

bdarcus

Am I right that the issue here is really access dates?

There's an inconsistency in CSL that is a consequence of legacy issues where layout for most dates needs to be formally created in the CSL. Those definitions are then, unfortunately, locale-specific. But for access dates, this is not the case.

Am not really sure what, if anything, to do about this, but we may need to keep an eye on it.

haraldkliems

erazlogo: My question was probably a bit unclear. In general, what I was asking about if CSL allowed any sort of localization, in the sense: "if (language=de-DE) then dateFormatA; elseif (language=en-US) then dateFormatB"... Your and Bruce's answers seem to imply that this is not the case.

bdarcus: yes and no. Access dates of websites are probably the most common case (and the linked thread is only about them); but there is another case where a full date is required: newpapers (e.g. Harris, G. (2008, December 3). British Balance Benefit vs. Cost of Latest Drugs. The New York Times, A12.)

bdarcus

@HobbesvsBoyle: not sure you're still paying attention, but unfortunately, you've stumbled on a dumb oversight in CSL. I hope we'll fix it sometime soon in both CSL and Zotero. Am not exactly sure how best to do that ATM though; it would be really awkward to have to have a long and complex conditional setup just to get date-handling properly localized.

morphiumdeus

Are you still working on this?
And in the meantime what would be the best way to change the date format manually?

morphiumdeus

I found A way, not sure if it is a good one:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/5104/modifying-word-plugin-using-journal-abbreviation-instead-of-publication-name/#Item_3
follow this guide and modify the "date-accessed"-section.

fbennett

Happy to report that the issues Bruce mentions were resolved by Rintze Zelle and Bruce a couple of months ago, and date localization will be included in CSL 1.0. The processor that supports it (written by yours truly) will probably start appearing in a Zotero development version sometime early next year.