Chicago style English (US) without automatic capitalisation?

Martine Oldhoff

Dear Zotero-experts,

I have a question concerning Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (full note, short title subsequently). I also have German titles and they are capitalised. For example: "Luther:
Einführung in sein Denken" becomes "Luther: Einführung In Sein Denken. (In German this is wrong, because German has rules for the capitalisation of words.)

Does anyone know a trick how to avoid this or a similar style which doesn't capitalise titles?

I can switch to German, but the problem is that in that case other German style rules are also applied. Therefore, I do want to stick to the American style - but I also want to keep my titles the way I have entered them in zotero (non-capitalised in non-English languages!)

I hope someone can help me.

Best wishes,
Martine

adamsmith

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

Martine Oldhoff

!This is great! Thank you very much!!

adamsmith

If you have a sizable number of German items, might be worth looking into doing this in batch using the Zutilo add-on. I'm pretty sure there's a way to do this with the copy field command, but it's not 100% intuitive.

Martine Oldhoff

I do have a sizeable number of German items. But I don't know the zutilo add-on, so I'll stick to adding the language code manually. Thank you!

AndySymons

I am writing a thesis in English about a German artist (Joseph Beuys), so I cite a lot of German sources and supply English translations. About 6 months ago, I switched to Jurism, which is a variant on Zotero that you can install on top of it, so it inherits your database (no need to re-do anything).

I strongly commend this to you.

With Jurism, you specify the language of the source item (book, article etc.) in the language field using the two-letter ISO code (en, de, etc). You can then specify one or more language variants for most of the fields (title, author, series etc.). Each is identified with the two-letter ISO code.

You then set preferences in Jurism to tell it the language of the document (en). Jurism will automatically select the correct variants (en) for any the title of any German source (de) and, with the settings I use, put the translation in square brackets (you can choose round or none). e.g.

Holzhey, Magdalena, and Dieter Koepplin, eds., Joseph Beuys: Zeichnungen 1945-1986: die Sammlung Klüser [~ Drawings 1945-1986: The Klüser Collection] (München: Schirmer Mosel, 2012)

It's great! When I wrote a paper in French, Jurism simply picked up the French variants instead of the German ones, so I did not need separate entries as I had before.