Language field is static, not adapting to the language of Bibliography

mxn
edited November 12, 2017
I have items in various languages in my library. I filled out the Language field. Now ideally I would just enter language codes in that field and when the .bib is called from LaTeX it would expand to "English" when I have bibliography in English and it would expand to "Englisch" when I have a bibliography in German. This doesn't work like that and manually changing that field every time depending on the language I'm writing is not an option. How can I get rid of that field entirely? Either for all items in Zotero or in my citation style authoryear-ibid?
  • dstillman
    edited November 12, 2017
    when the .bib is called from LaTeX it would expand to "English" […] This doesn't work like that
    I'm not sure what you're referring to here. This part isn't about Zotero, presumably? What do you mean by "the language of the bibliography"? What bibliography, where?
  • mxn
    You are right, It's more of a LaTeX question. How is that language field supposed to be filled out? is there a standard?
  • adamsmith
    yes -- use ISO language/country codes, e.g. en-US for US English, fr-FR for French French, etc. I don't believe those get exported correctly to LaTeX, so this will likely not solve your problems, but to the extent that we will address this for LaTeX export, that's the input we'd expect.
  • mxn
    edited November 13, 2017
    Ah, thanks. From a usability perspective It would be nice to have this info in in a hover bubble over this field, a little info button next to it, or just make a drop down with all the language codes or something.

    How to mark a bilingual publication?
  • nickbart
    > How to mark a bilingual publication?

    Short answer: You can’t, at least not via Zotero’s “Language” field.

    Zotero’s “Language” field, just like biblatex’s “langid” field, is not supposed to describe the language(s) used inside the work in question (e.g., “Greek and English”), but merely specifies the (primary) language of the bibliographic record (hence no more than one language tag is allowed here by Zotero as well as by biblatex) – which is relevant for case conversion of the title and (at least when using latex) hyphenation.

    (Zotero, quite correctly, maps the “Language” field to biblatex’s “langid” field upon export, but the purpose of Zotero’s “Language” field seems to be misunderstood at times; this might be something that could be explained more clearly in Zotero’s documentation …)

    biblatex does have a “language” field that is indeed used to describe one or more language(s) used inside the work, but there is no Zotero counterpart – though it’d be great to see that kind of functionality added to Zotero in the future.
  • mxn
    Aaaahhhhh. I see.
  • emilianoeheyns
    a "language" field could be added using BBTs cheater syntax.
  • mxn
    edited December 2, 2017
    @adamsmith when importing by ISBN magic wand I often get Language fields automatically filled out with stuff like "ger, eng" is that a translator issue? for instance 978-3-211-23871-4 I manually change it to "de-DE" (or "de-DE;en-US"?)
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