New Field Types for Foreign-Language Documents

edited February 15, 2018
Extensions to many common styles, like Chicago, required by typical journals and book publishers, like Taylor and Francis, demand that when you cite a foreign document in a foreign language you provide:

Translated Title
Title in the Original Writing Systems (Latin, Cyrillic, etc.)
Transliterated Title

The same goes for Authors, Translators, Publishers, Place Published, Secondary and Tertiary titles and authors, etc.

Can this be included please? This is common in History and many other fields and hard to overcome (either lots of custom fields that can be used for this or painful manual editing).

Here is an example:

Mayzelis, Il'ya (Майзелис, Илья). 1973. "Emanuel Lasker i ego kniga." (Эммануил Ласкер и его книга) [Emanuel Lasker and his book] In Kak Viktor stal shakhmatistom (Как Виктор стал шахматистом) [How Victor became a chess player] Il'ya Mayzelis (Илья Майзелис), 111–142. Moskva: Detskaya literatura.

I am not a regular Zotero user so I might be missing something but I looked thought the list of current and planned Fields and I cannot see this. I am considering Zotero for a large collaborative environment and this is a stumbling block (the other one is Batch editing, which I see is planned).

Thanks.
  • Have a look at this thread, exact same problem. https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/69875/how-to-cite-a-book-with-its-translation#latest

    it of course depends on the style you are using and if those fields are used in said style. Certainly doable.
  • edited February 15, 2018
    Current CSL specification use these "original" variables:
    original publisher, for items that have been republished by a different publisher
    original-publisher-place for geographic location of the original publisher (e.g. “London, UK”)
    original-title for the title of the original version (e.g. “Война и мир”, the untranslated Russian title of “War and Peace”)

    You can use these variables in the extra field and CSL processor will it wrote in the output (if these variables are implemented in the CSL style). There is nothing like original author.

    EDIT: I never heard yout rules for transliteration of "Authors, Translators, Publishers, Place Published, Secondary and Tertiary titles and authors, etc.". Can you provide the link for a style which needs it? Thanks.
    "
  • This is what Juris-M is intended for: https://juris-m.github.io/downloads
  • @damnation Thanks, I have read that thread now, not sure I can follow but seems a struggle. :) In general, I would like to be able to customize the styles that I use, in my experience (elsewhere) this is often needed but if there are no fields to hold data or different styles use the same fields for different reasons this might be tricky.

    @LiborA Not a style, this is context-dependent, some audiences need this, others don't. See chapter 11 in Chicago 17 and for an example of an interpretation that was advised as a customized version of Chicago see this: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14626268.2016.1151443

    @fbennett Thanks, I did not know about it. Looks interesting. With reference databases, that are meant to last for 10s of years across groups of researchers it is a bit scary to commit to small 'unofficial' platforms that might get abandoned for all kids of (eg personal) reasons, have small user bases, etc. I have seen it not once in the past. At the moment, your link would not load for me for some reason... Reading about the context here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/65405/multilinguality-zotero-vs-mlz-vs-juris-m Looks like a great effort but...
  • @sdflewrit783
    Not really. There is a solution in there. See the first answer by bwiernik.
    You can edit your style to include the various original-x variables.
    These then need to be input into the extra field within Zotero.
    Simples.
  • @sdflewrit783 If you don't trust my work, don't use my software. :)
  • @sdflewrit783 If you do a lot of multilingual citations, I strongly recommend you use Juris-M. It will work much easier than vanilla Zotero. Frank is very reliable and has maintained it for over a decade. In the event that he ever stops, you can easily switch back to vanilla Zotero instead.
  • Yeah, I think that's a key point -- Juris-m is sync compatible with Zotero, so there's minimal lock-in.

    I think the concern about sustainability isn't unreasonable -- it's a good question to ask for any software you use heavily and has less to do with trusting the developer (everyone who is using Zotero is already trusting fbennett's code for formatting citations) than with asking about contingencies.
  • @sdflewrit783 didn't ask a question about sustainability.
  • edited February 17, 2018
    @fbennett and all. Thanks for the answers. It is about sustainability, my gut trusts your work completely ... :) ... but my frontal lobes cannot assess what I know next to nothing about. Loss of interest, a new job, retiring, a takeover by a larger company with other priorities, sickness or death, I have seen many reasons for excellent and even world-leading software to stall or die, with whole workflows needing a redesign. I see articles claiming that Facebook might go the way of MySpace very soon, too many parents on it.

    Some organisations are now trying to address this problem by setting up an independent endowment that guarantees practical perpetuity. E.g., see the Open Science Framework.

    @damnation Are there some posts missing? @bwiernik recommends Juris-m so Zotero does NOT seem that easy. I do not do many such citations and no legal citations. People in my group might do more but also not that many. In the other software we use, a few extra string fields and some custom styles is all that we needed so far.

    Clearly I need to go and try, or stay as we are, which seems easier. Thanks again for the helpful advice.
  • edited February 17, 2018
    The recommendation for juris-m is because it can do more and can do so more flexibly: it can store both translations _and_ transcriptions and display either or both in a variety of formats with little effort in any existing citation style.

    If all you need is two titles and are willing to customize citation styles, that's indeed something Zotero using the original-title workaround can already handle.

    Edit: I just see the full request in the original post. All these fields will definitely not happen in the near future (let's say 12 months) in Zotero.
Sign In or Register to comment.