Preferred method fo indicating non-Latin language

JohnHMoore

We have a style convention to indicate if a document is in a non-Latin language as the last item in the citation (e.g. ".....(2017) (In Russian)"). The Zotero language field often has Latin language information filled in (e.g. "English", "French") etc. How do people typically handle this? Would you recommend just do a manual typing work around or use another Zotero field specifically for non-Latin language information?

DWL-SDCA

I don't have an answer to your question and I have wondered about that myself.

Your comment about the language field may reflect a misunderstanding of its purpose. See:

https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/item_types_and_fields

Scroll down to the information about the language field.

Also, see:

https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/preventing_title_casing_for_non-english_titles

and:
https://github.com/citation-style-language/locales/wiki


(I've wondered about the possibility of Zotero automatically converting the full-word language when that is placed in the language with the 2-character lower case abbreviation. Perhaps this might be more appropriate for the translators than the program itself. I find that quite a few publisher's metadata has the full-word instead of the ISO abbreviation.)

Rintze

While it's possible to store the language of an item, and while CSL styles automatically make some changes based on the item's language (e.g. title case is only active for English items and items of unknown language, see http://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#non-english-items), it's not actually possible to test for the item's language in the style with a conditional. So it's currently not possible to print something like " (In Russian)".

We would at minimum need a "language" CSL variable, and arguably the locale files should contain translations of the locale codes.

bwiernik

That's definitely not a bad idea to add to CSL. There are enough style variations (e.g., grouping citations by language), to justify the complexity.

@JohnHMoore, in the mean time, you might check out the Juris-M program, which is a fork of Zotero with additional multilingual support. It might have the features to meet your needs.

adamsmith

But as for what to do currently, I'd probably use an unused field -- Extra if that's an option, something else otherwise.

I agree that a language field in CSL would make sense, though unclear how exactly we'd want to handle it.