Juris-M / MLZ: Transliteration doesn’t appear in exported file

wush1

I’m using the latest version (July 20th) of Juris-M for multilingual support.
In Juris-M, I first add Chinese and English in the preferences and setup the primary / secondary options. Then, I add transliterations of Names and Titles.
Exporting in BibLaTeX format, none of the added fields show up in the .bib file.
I assume I’m doing it wrong: could you please give me a hint?

fbennett

As far as I know, the *.bib format does not have a mechanism for storing field variants. (If it does, the export translator would need to be extended to support it.)

DWL-SDCA

Does a Juris-M MODS export include translations / transliterations? I haven't tried lately...I couldn't get an earlier version of MLZ to do this, at least not as I expected? I realize that format change exports are not the primary reason to use Juris-M and that exporting may improve with program maturity.

What I really would like to see is a way to export the multi-language versions of author names, item titles, etc. If that already exists, I will redouble my efforts to identify the nature of the problem on my end.

http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/userguide/generalapp.html

fbennett

The Juris-M MODS export translator is definitely meant to handle language variants - a research cluster at Heidelberg University relies on it. I'll take a look at it later today; possibly there is a version mismatch that needs adjusting, or it may need an update to cover a later MODS release.

DWL-SDCA

More likely, there was a problem on my end. I will do much testing and get back with you. If you say this should work, I'll go with what you have in the most recent version. My use of MLZ / Juris-M is to capture metadata into Zotero, make a few edits, export to MODS format, and import the record into the SafetyLit database. This process worked well when I first began using MLZ, I had a problem months ago and didn't then have time to test. I realized that, as this worked in the past, it should probably work now. With today's question, I wanted to know if this was supposed to work before I reinstall Juris-M and use it as my primary platform. (Incidentally, essentially every journal publisher sends me metadata feeds for selected journals. For those that are indexed cover-to-cover that is useful and quick. However, for journals where relevant items appear only a few times per volume, visiting the website, reading the article titles and the abstracts for seemingly relevant ones, and using Zotero to capture the metadata is much more efficient than using the publishers' metadata feeds. I have to do a bit of cut-and-paste to get at the non-primary language content for some journals, but Zotero / Juris-M is a great time saver.)

Are there Juris-M translators that will import multi-language material in the metadata. My experience is that most metadata doesn't include transliterations. Have I been missing something?

fbennett

The only fully multilingual structured metadata design that I have encountered on a website cite CiNII, but there might be others. Unfortunately, the entries in CiNII are not curated, and although the RDF model that they use is fully capable, the metadata from the site is of poor quality.

When you install Juris-M, it will leave your Zotero database intact, so you can switch back by syncing, disabling Juris-M, enabling Zotero, and syncing again.

wush1

But it is possible to manually add transliterations of names and book titles to the .bib file, like shown below.

@book{HuangQu1995Quanguo,
title = {Quanguo Manwen tushu ziliao lianhe mulu},
titleaddon = { 全国满文图书资料联合目录 },
shorttitle = {Quanguo Manwen tushu},
editor = {Huang, 黃润华 , Runhua and Qu, 屈六生 , Liusheng},
publisher = {Shumu wenxian chubanshe},
date = {1991},
address = {Beijing},
usere = {Union catalog of Manchu material nationwide}
}

Is it not possible to get a similar result with Juris-M? If not, what is its advantage over vanilla Zotero?

fbennett

For round-trip export and import, variant fields need to be tagged by language. RDF and the CSL processor JSON format support language tagging. BibTeX does not, unfortunately, and that makes it unsuitable (or at least not very robust) for handling multilingual records.

You could modify a personal copy of the BibTeX export translator to produce records with a mixture of original- and variant-language content, but I wouldn't be able to include it in the distribution.

duncdrum

The problem for including names and titles are quite different in the bibtex world.
titleaddon and user[a-z] can safely be used for any language combination/role.
But because of how names 9author editors, etc) are processed in footnotes, in-text citations, and how references are sorted in bibliographies Frank is right. Unless biblatex becomes fit for multi-lingual documents, I don't see how it can be made to play nice with jurism.

emilianoeheyns

I'm trying to get something sensible using BBT, but it's a royal mess. Frank suggested a while ago a post-biber should "just" wrap citeproc-js, and I'm beginning to think he's right on that. Good thing the bibtex process and file formats have such stellar documentation, should be easy...