creators in list view: concatenate with "&"

mshino

The list view concatenates two authors with "and" or the localized word like "und" in my case. I work in a multilingual environment, and the combination of East Asian writings systems with "und" looks a bit awkward. I would rather have the column show a neutral "&" like "Nakamura & Tanakana" or "中村 & 田中", which fits well with creators of work in European languages as well like "Müller & Zürcher" e.g.

Are there settings for this case?

Thanks,
Maria

dstillman

We could consider just switching to that generally. It feels a bit less friendly to me, but it does have the benefit of taking up less space.

Do you happen to know whether the ampersand itself would need to be localized? E.g., would someone using a Chinese locale find an ampersand acceptable, or would they use a different character?

adamsmith

From CSL we know that even people in some European languages (Spanish, French) consider the ampersand "wrong", so switching might be tricky

mshino

Thanks for the considerations. I think we are dealing with two different cases.

(1) Presentation of creators in the UI of Zotero, i.e. the list in the center pane. Using an ampersand makes sense not only because it is neutral, but short.

(2) As far as I understand, there is no relation to the CSL in the UI, which could use whatever it needs to use, whether ampersand or not.

As for dstillman's question about different shapes or variations of ampersands, there are indeed double space ampersands (＆) and single space ampersands, which are like those in Western fonts.

I can speak for Japanese, and difference in usage of one over the other is not strictly standardized, it is more, if you decide to use this, stay with it.

As long as a Western ampersand would be used in the UI with whitespace around -- as would be the case anyway -- there should be no problem with Japanese, but as far as I can judge, neither with Hangeul or Chinese.

So, a change in the UI would be most appreciated!

dstillman

adamsmith understands that CSL isn't used in the middle pane. The point is just that localizing CSL has given us knowledge of what people in different countries consider appropriate, and it sounds like an ampersand may not be as universally accepted as you suggest. (A post on Quora points out that various European languages already have a one-character word for "and", and I imagine even a two-letter word like "et" makes an ampersand less common.)

mshino

You are right, as adamsmith is.

I am really thankful for the effort and understanding that is going into the international styles, as well as the understanding for multilingual needs. So I hope I did not sound unfriendly, I just tried to separate the needs and answer your question as far as East Asian scripts are concerned.

Though I have some knowledge in classical and modern Chinese as well as Korean, I am mostly concerned with Japanese, beside English and German. So my perspective is limited.

mshino

Colons / ampersands

I thought about the issue, simple colons might do the trick I thought, but these are very different in East Asian Scripts, the ampersand is the most neutral.

My concern was less to have a shorter creator column in the UI than rather having reasonable aesthetics. I still think that looking at "田中 und 中村" is less acceptable than "Santo & Domingo" in Spanish (sorry for my lack of understanding Spanish), it is at least all in one system and aesthetics, regardless of whether we talk about Roman scripts or East Asian scripts. I also can imagine that Russian and citations in other East European writings systems look equally ugly when arbitrarily combined with the writing system of the user interface.

Just to make more understandabe why I came up with the ampersand. I really appreciate your work and considerations.

Best,
Maria

adamsmith

Not convinced that the ampersand works. While I agree that it's less jarring than a German "und" in between Chinese characters, it would affect all entries in all Spanish-locale Zotero versions (and any other language that doesn't do ampersands) as opposed to only (a subset of) multi-lingual libraries that look wrong with the localized and. So we'd be turning bad for some people into less bad, but for many more people, which is unsatisfactory.

Simple comma or semicolon is used in some citation styles even for two authors and at least exists in many (most?) languages, but is probably less readable.

An all out option would be to localize the "and" for each item based on the language field, but not sure if people would actually like that.

bwiernik

I think localizing based on the client language would be better than per item. Ampersand would be overall better for English I think. I think it could be pretty straightforward to pick a 'form = “short”’ sort of and symbol for each language.

mshino

I see your point, but I cannot perfectly agree:

First of all, a change to the ampersand does not turn something bad into something less bad, but rather turning something bad into something good.

Secondly, while there may be many Zotero users dealing with Spanish literature, I estimate the need for mixed citations of East Asian and other writing systems by far larger.

Thirdly, I can hardly imagine that the ampersand, a sign for concatenation with centuries of tradition in Europe, are alien to Spanish and other languages and do look aesthetically unpleasing despite usage in the same writing system like English etc.

mshino

@bwiernik

Agreed as far as localizing per item is concerned.

The ampersand is a universal compromise that works in any writing system and language, so it does not need an adaptation per item, I thought when I suggested this change in the GUI.

As far as the system or client language is concerned, this is mostly a language that has no relation to the languages of the items. I have literature in many languages and writing systems in my database, my system is set up in German or Japanese, and depending on the paper I am writing, the export style is English or Japanese in most cases. In case of an English paper I am writing, the writing system of the export style changes, e.g. "田中 & 中村" in the GUI becomes "Tanaka and Nakamura" according to the CSL style or Biblatex export.

So in my understanding, the UI needs to be independent of language and writing system of the papers as well as of the client system, while the export of styles is dependent on the language and writing system of the paper that is being written, rather than on the original paper. -- In Japanese papers, it is a bit different, but Zotero can handle that very well.

And I agree, it might be nice to pick to have a choice for the GUI.