Language of an item

martinacc

Hi,

it took a great pain to found out that it was the "language" of an item causing the problem.

I use SBL style. I searched and found out it will automatically transform the text-title into title capitalization (for English references). However it didn't. And it turned out because in the "language" field of the item, it says "英语", which means "English" in Chinese ! Zotero does not recognize 英语 means English, therefore taking it as non-English.

I think it was probably because I set up the System Language as Chinese on my computer. (Now I have changed it to English. Hope this solves the problem temporarily.)

I have two questions:
1. How can I replace “英语” with "English" in all existing items in my Library?
2. Can this problem be fixed in the future? For example, Zotero would be able to recognize “英语" actually means "English." Or Zotero would put "English" instead of ”英语“ when importing an item.

Blessings,
Martin

adamsmith

where did you import those items from and how? I don't think Zotero has any setting that would affect language on import. I don't think we'll be able to recognize English in all possible languages, I'm sorry. The intended input, btw., is not "English" but the ISO two (or four) letter abbreviations, i.e. en or en-US.

It's not trivial to change that for all items, but see
https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/client_coding/javascript_api?&#batch_editing
if you want to give it a try.

martinacc

Hi Adam,

Thank you for the quick reply.

I mostly import items from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary Library website.
http://www.gordonconwell.edu/library/Hamilton-Goddard.cfm

It is weird that only the field of "language" is in Chinese, all the rest are in English.

I just did another test. And the problem seems to persist.
I have changed the primary system language on Mac to English.
Here is the link for the book I searched for: https://gordonconwell.on.worldcat.org/search?databaseList=638&queryString=from+creation+to+new+creation

I imported the first book in the search result: From creation to new creation : Old Testament perspectives

In the imported item, only the language field says "英语” (meaning "English"), all the rest are in English...

I think I will just change the existing items by myself. I exported the library, and opened it with TextWrangler and did a search. There are about only 100 items having “英语”.
But I do hope this problem can be fixed for future importing.

Thanks,
Martin

martinacc

I just solved the problem!

It is because of the Chrome. I went to the Settings in Chrome, and changed the language priority, making English as the primary language (was Chinese).

Now it says "English", still not "en" or "en-US" though.

adamsmith

Oddly, when you use that catalog in Chinese, it exports the language (and just the language) in Chinese. If you use it in English, it exports it in English. I can see if we can do anything about that, but my guess would be that we can't.

(What Zotero uses is: Sharing Options --> Cite this Item --> Endnote; you can see for yourself in the exported .RIS file.)

edit: so just to be clear -- this is a setting of that library catalog. Not Zotero/Chrome, though it's possibel the catalog auto-adjusts to your Chrome language settings.

martinacc

I think Chrome is probably responsible for that.

I did the same thing on Safari, with the default decoding language as "Chinese". The language field is still "English."
I have not changed the System Language back to Chinese to double check if this would affect Safari rather than the settings on Safari itself.

Thanks a lot, Adam.
I'm glad it was figured out!

Martin