No capitalization in MLA-style?

elenanarvaez
I write in Spanish where no capitalization is used in work titles. I know EndNote has a special style for MLA without automatic capitals in titles. Would it be possible for Zotero to offer that kind of alternative for us who don't write in English? I have tried to turn off capitalization in the hidden preferences, changing the value to "false", but the program keeps capitalizing automatically. Any other suggestion on how I can turn it off?
  • adamsmith
    The MLA style does not put automatic capitals in the title - it prints whatever is in the title field in Zotero. It's not possible to reliably convert title-case to sentence-case in a style automatically - you'll have to change the capitalization of the respective title fields in Zotero. (the reverse is possible btw - should you ever need title case Zotero styles can convert from sentence case to title case).
  • elenanarvaez
    Thank you for your answer. I don't know why my Zotero then automatically puts the titles of my work with capitals in my parenthetical citations. If I put "Misión social de la mujer" in the title field in Zotero, what comes out in my citation (and also in my list of works cited) is "Misión Social De La Mujer", which is totally incorrect in Spanish standards. As I said, I have turned capitalization to "false" in hidden preferences, and also changed Zotero language to Spanish in the hidden preferences, but it keeps on doing this automatically.
  • adamsmith
    to clarify - it does that in the parenthetical citations when an author is missing, but not in the bibliography? And which version of Zotero is this?
    (I cannot reproduce this on Zotero 2.0.9)
    I don't think the hidden preferences should matter here - the capitalization one is for import, not for export.
  • elenanarvaez
    I have version 2.0.9 for Mac. I tried to use MLA style on my other Mac and then the programme does not automatically capitalize initial letters in citations, but it still does it on the Mac I am working on right now. I still can't understand why.
  • elenanarvaez
    I installed the MLA style again in Zotero and restarted the computer. Now it works perfectly! Thank you for your answers.
  • olaf
    I had the same problem and reinstalling the MLA Style helped as well.
    I realized by doing that, that all my styles seems to be old (earlyer than 2010) and most have been updated especially for the 2.1 zotero. There is a button for actualizing import filters, I could not found any for the styles. Am I missing something or do I have to manually look for updates every week or so?

    thanks
    olaf
  • adamsmith
    Unfortunately yes, you do have to manually update styles. In the future, they, like site translators, will update automatically.
  • Nemours
    I am writing for a journal that uses MHRA style except that there are quotations in French and book and article titles are expected to be cited in French style (only initial caps). Is there a simple way to turn off automatic capitalization? I've looked at numerous forum posts but see nothing that seems possible to implement. I even manually corrected the capitalization in footnotes, only to have Word then recapitalize everything.
  • adamsmith
    One thing that should work is to put language codes into Zotero
    i.e. put fr-FR in the language field for the items that are in French. I'm not 100% sure that's implemented yet, so please test this for an item or two first to see if it works before you change all your items.
    And since it's the obvious follow-up question: no, unfortunately you can't do this for multiple items at once.

    If that's no option, it's not terribly hard to create a custom copy of the style without title casing.
  • luispalerm
    That language code thing actually works, like magic! I used sp-SP for spanish items and just clicked refresh on Word and everything is the way it's supposed to be. Thank you very much.
  • adamsmith
    as a matter of correctness (and if you want to use future functionality that may be triggered by the language field) - the code for Spanish from Spain is es-SP.
    As you note this will work (as will, I believe, any two letter combination in lowercaps), but at least for new entries you may want to input this correctly.
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