Change citation language

javsalgar · March 6, 2013

Hello everyone,

I am using Zotero Libreoffice Integration plugin for my documents and I have the following problem. I normally write documents in English or Spanish depending on the case, but when I use Zotero Word Processor plugin for my document in Spanish, I get the citation in English, that is:

“Ambito y Modelo De Lasswell.” Accessed March 6, 2013. http://freshadvertising.blogspot.es/1236160620/.

Is there any way I can change the language of the citations? I know this is a minor problem, but it would really helpful for those that work with more than one language.

Thank you in advance

Gracile · March 6, 2013

http://www.zotero.org/support/supported_languages#citations_and_bibliographies

nalimilan · April 26, 2013

I second this request. I think it is common for users from non-English speaking countries to frequently write documents in their native language and in English. Manually switching Zotero's language "hidden" option is painful, and error-prone since reopening a document after a while will no give the expected results if you have changed the language in the meantime. You cannot share documents easily either without asking colleagues to change their language via the "hidden" option, which is not super easy.

Since word processors all provide a per-document language option, the Zotero plug-in should use this information to format citations and bibliography. (But maybe that's more complex to do than it seems... ;-)

Thanks for your work!

adamsmith · April 26, 2013

I think having the ability to set a language for a document would be nice - IIRC it's not actually possible to use Word's language information for that for technical reasons, though
Two things in the meantime:
a) Many citation styles have a hard-coded default locale, i.e. they'll always appear in the same language snd
b) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/zotero-bibliography-locale-swi/ still works afaik.

nalimilan · April 26, 2013

Out of curiosity, what are the technical reasons preventing this to work in Word? How about LibreOffice?

adamsmith · April 26, 2013

I'm pretty sure the document language isn't an easily accessible property for the plugin.

joheli · June 10, 2013

It works fine in conjunction with the Firefox Addon "Quick Locale Switcher".

*But*: according to my experience not all styles support change into other locales. E.g. "Chicago Manual of Styles (author-date)" supports change into de-DE, many others simply don't. Unfortunately I don't know how to teak a style into supporting locale change.

Gracile · June 10, 2013

joheli: you're right. You can edit the style though: just change the default-locale.
Relevant links:
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step
http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#the-root-element-cs-style