capitalisation of "foreign" language references

Taddy
Hello,
I am having a horrible time getting zotero to correctly capitalise titles in languages other than english. My bibliography is in UK english, but many of my references are in German, French, Italian, or something else. I'm using standalone, and the plugin for word. Also word 2016 mac. For a while, it seemed that if I specified the language in the reference file (e.g. de or German) zotero would capitalise correctly. But that isn't working any more. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks very much!
  • Gracile
    Does that help: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/preventing_title_casing_for_non-english_titles ?
  • adamsmith
    And where that doesn't work (as you seem to indicate), we'd want to know more details -- Zotero version, citation style, if this doesn't work at all or just not for some items, if it also doesn't work in a fresh document.
  • Taddy
    I may just be trying to do something that can't be done. With the language codes, Zotero doesn't seem to title cap, so if I make sure the capitalisation is correct in the zotero fields, it stays that way. Unfortunately, most of the citations I imported directly from library catalogues don't end up correctly capitalised, so I have to change them by hand. I was hoping that if the language code was correct, zotero would be able to automatically capitalise correctly (e.g. all nouns in German, only the first word in French.) Maybe it just doesn't. For what it's worth, I'm using Chicago 16th edition, author date, and zotero 4.0.29.15. And no, a fresh document makes no difference.
    Thanks very much for you help!
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited September 25, 2017
    English language titles should be entered in "sentence case" that is, the first letter of the first word and the first letter of proper nouns in upper case. You can quickly convert title case to sentence case by right clicking in the title field (after you have edited the field you will need to click elsewhere and return to the field before you right click). After using the right click quick convert you will need to edit the title to begin proper nouns with an upper case character.

    If you enter English language items in sentence case, Zotero can properly convert them to title case if the citation style requires that.

    For items with English language titles be sure to enter "en" in the language field.

    The titles of items in other languages Zotero styles should not change the word case if de, fr, or other language abbreviations are used. Imported items will thus need to be edited so that words begin with a character of the correct case. Zotero, nor any other software, can consult a word list to indicate which words should begin with an upper case character. While such conversions might be theoretically possible, implementation in a way that performs the change correctly would be extremely resource-demanding or employ magic. Such a utility would require not only lists of words of each language, it would also require an engine to analyze the context in which each word is used.

    (edited for grammar and clarity)

  • adamsmith
    But no, Zotero can't fix capitalization in non - English titles. I don't actually think that's even theoretically possible to automate.
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