Translated Books in Anthology or Edited Volume?

Ayerbender
I am doing extensive work with books that are translated and included in anthologies/edited volumes. I mainly use Chicago style. However, the only option to cite these items seems to be "Book Section", which does not cite the various items properly.

For comparison, this is how Zotero currently cites Descartes' Discourse on the Method (html added to show where italicizations should be):

René Descartes, “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, trans. Robert Stoothoff, vol. I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 111–51.

This is how the Discourse should be cited:

René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, trans. Robert Stoothoff, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, vol. I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 111–51.

Notice: (a) The title of the Discourse *and* the volume should be italicized; (b) the Discourse's title should *not* be surrounded by quotation marks; (c) the translator should be applied to the Discourse *not* to the volume; and (d) the editors should be linked to the volume *not* to the Discourse.

I attempted several solutions to workaround these issues:

(1) I set the Discourse as a book and italicized the volume title in the "series" section:

René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, trans. Robert Stoothoff, vol. I, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

This obviously is unacceptable: (a) the editors are being applied to the Discourse rather than the volume; (b) the volume # is ascribed to the Discourse, too, rather than the volume; and (c) the volume is not preceded by "in" as Chicago-style requires.

(2) I then tried fixing these by (a) setting the editors as series editors, (b) putting volume # in series #, and (c) adding the "in" to the series title directly:

René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, trans. Robert Stoothoff, In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

This is even worse: (a) the editors do not show up *at all*. (Less importantly, (b) "in" is capitalized as "In"; (c) the volume number is not preceded by "volume"/"vol." [I could manually add "volume" *or* "vol." into the series #, but then that messes up bibliography or note.] These however, are not as serious problems.)

I looked up similar requests, and the most detailed response I found was this thread, which suggested the addition of a "volume title" section: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/26476/helpfeature-request-individual-volumes-as-parts-of-multivolume-works (It also included a now-defunct CSL file that could support "volume title".)

As such, the only available solution I see is to manually edit citations for each document I prepare. But this is tedious, especially when I'm using a dozen+ different works. Is there a more efficient solution?
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  • adamsmith
    I'm afraid there is no viable workaround at this time, sorry.
  • Ayerbender
    Ok, two related questions for employing a manual workaround:

    (1) One thing I plan to do is to cite to the volume of works directly, then to each individual works (e.g. CSM I: Discourse on the Method). Normally multiple citations are separated by a semicolon (CSM I; Discourse on the Method). If I suffix a comma to the volume, it replaces that semicolon (e.g. CSM I, Discourse on the Method). However, if I suffix a colon, it does not (e.g. CSM I:; Discourse on the Method). This seems like a bug. How do I make it such that suffixing a colon replaces the semicolon?

    (2) Is there a way to remove quotations from the "book section" title? I.e. such that <"Discourse on the Method"> is cited as ? One of the problems is that when typing up a bibliography, the Discourse will not be grouped with the volume.
  • nickbart

    One somewhat hackish solution for having titles italicized rather than wrapped in quotes would be to add a flag to such “bookinbook” items by assigning an arbitrary value to an otherwise unused variable, say original-author, and, in the CSL style file, make italicization conditional upon this variable being non-empty. For example, in chicago-author-date.csl, line 237 would have to be replaced by

    <choose>
      <if variable="original-author">
        <text variable="title" text-case="title" font-style="italic" />
      </if>
      <else>
        <text variable="title" text-case="title" quotes="true" />
      </else>
    </choose>
  • bwiernik
    edited December 26, 2018
    The easiest approach would probably be to enter the item as a "Book" and then to enter the Anthology title and page range in Extra like this:
    Container title: The philosophical writings of Descartes
    Page: 111-151

    Then, adjust the style to test for whether a "book" item has a "container-title".

    @adamsmith Is this a sufficiently common type of citation that we might consider adjusting the official Chicago styles to accommodate?
  • Ayerbender
    edited January 1, 2019
    @nickbart and @bwiernik thank you so much for your help! Two questions: (1) how do I make these changes to the CSL file?; (2) How do I ensure this change only affects the items I want it to affect, and not, say, book chapters or articles in books, which *should* have quotations around them?

    @bwiernik this is a very common type of citation (at least in my field - political philosophy). Pretty much every major author's works are contained in some sort of anthology, including their books. I obviously can't speak for whether there is sufficient demand for Zotero, though - offering my 2 cents as a user :)
  • Ayerbender
    @nickbart I think I figured out how to add it to the citation style, but there's no option in Zotero for "original author". How do I add that?
  • nickbart
    edited January 2, 2019
    @Ayerbender – You’ll have to add a string like “original-author: foo” to the “Extra” field.

    (So-called “cheater syntax”, specs here: https://citeproc-js.readthedocs.io/en/latest/csl-json/markup.html#cheater-syntax-for-odd-fields.)

    In fact, you could use whatever term you like instead of “foo”, the only thing that matters here is that the “original-author” variable has to be non-empty.
  • adamsmith
    As for the question/discussion above -- I agree this is a relevant/important use case, so no need to argue that, but since my current understanding is that we'd want a different variable entirely to handle it properly, I don't really like the idea of including the version using container-title in a style on the repository.
  • bwiernik
    Would we need a different variable, rather than just a book with a container-title?
  • adamsmith
    edited January 3, 2019
    Good question. This is different from a named volume in a multi-volume work, right? Volume title would seem to be slightly off in that case anyway, so maybe container-title works?
    @Rintze thoughts on this? I guess a concern would be that this makes this indistinguishable from a chapter in terms of the variables present, but I think we'll just have to live with that.

    While not central for CSL, another question is how we'd imagine Zotero et al. would display the entry field for that variable without confusing people who just want to enter a book.

    edit: another issue, separate but related, is what to do with the translator -- we have no way in CSL (or Zotero) to assign a translator to a title or a container). That also came up in bwiernik's recent question on editortranslator

    (Sorry for the somewhat technical language -- trying to think this through at various levels)
  • bwiernik
    Yeah, the translator issue is one I wrestled with in working on the APA update. The logic that seemed most likely to be correct most of the time is to treat the translator as the translator of the item (not the container) when there is a container-title, unless there is an editortranslator.
  • nickbart

    @adamsmith

    This is different from a named volume in a multi-volume work, right?

    Absolutely. It’s no different from a book section actually, but because of its publication history (originally published as a book) convention demands that it be formatted differently (i.e., italicized).

    No sure about container-title. If this can be made to work nicely in style files, fine – but I find this way, way too opaque. I’d prefer an explicit solution – either a separate item type (like biblatex’s “bookinbook”), or a flag variable that can be set for a “book section” item (e.g., via a checkbox labelled “Originally published as a book” in the Zotero GUI).

    another issue, separate but related, is what to do with the translator

    @bwiernik’s approach (“treat the translator as the translator of the item (not the container) when there is a container-title, unless there is an editortranslator”) sounds like a useful rule of thumb. I’m just not sure whether everyone, in particular classicists, will be happy with this. (After all, Meno, tr. Foo, in Plato, Works, ed. Bar might not be totally wrong per se, but still is not quite the same as Meno, in Plato, Works, tr. Foo, ed. Bar).

    Add to that the fact that book sections can have editors as well as translators, and that individual volumes of multi-volume works may have separate editors or translators, too, it might be worth considering whether we’d need actually need a number of new CSL variables, including container-editor, container-translator, volume-editor, volume-translator, as well as volume-author.

  • bwiernik
    My concern here is these all add a huge amount of complexity to CSL to address what is a fairly limited set of cases.
  • Ayerbender
    @nickbart thanks! I'll give it a looksee and let you know if I have any questions
  • maier.de
    Just a quick follow up: I think that a official solution for this bookinbook thing is absolutely needed. In my own styles, I usually use something like bookinbook:true in the extra field, which citeproc-js seems to pick up at the moment. However, those style can't be included in the style repository.

    As for the question whether a flag or a distinct item type would be a better solution: I guess a flag has the advantage that this could also be used for ancient books that are edited and published in a journal article.

    Concerning translators, editors, etc.: I can understand the concern that adding these new variables will make CSL much more complex, yet I have to say that, at least in my fields (religion, philosophy), these are rather common requirements. Most classical texts in these fields appear in some sort of collected works, where both the volume and the container have editors.

    Concerning the GUI: I understand that adding new name variables could make the GUI a bit convoluted. My idea would be to change the way names are entered. Right now, names are entered together in one block, which I actually find a bit strange since names might belong to different levels; author corresponds to title, editor usually corresponds to booktitle (or volume title). It would feel more natural if editors would be entered after the booktitle, i.e. names should be entered right after the relevant title. (Of course, it should be possible to add an editor after booktitle, another after volume title, etc.)





  • fbennett
    edited June 3, 2019
    CSL-M addresses this with a schema for supplementary fields and a pair of elements used to rerun the layout for the secondary item and join it to the main reference. Documentation on the elements etc is here.

    Edit: Jonathan Lewis has provided a tutorial that illustrates use of the mechanism from the user perspective. The style used in the tutorial is that of the Japan Sociological Society.
  • fbennett
    edited June 3, 2019
    An attraction of this approach is that it reuses existing style code, so reprint/translation forms can be added to an existing style without extra styling work and its associated maintenance burden. Also (not mentioned in the docs ATM), the type of the secondary item can be changed with an alt-type: entry in Extra, which allows support for arbitrary type combinations. (For example, a piece originally published as a book chapter in French might be translated into English and republished in a special issue of a journal.)
  • bwiernik
    That’s an interesting approach. Given that a subset of `original-` CSL fields already exist, think that that a schema where the reprinted version is the “main” item and the original version referred to with “original-“ Fields would be best.

    Translations/transliteration of individual fields ala Juris-M (not references to translated versions of the item) should probably be handled separately.
  • fbennett
    The cs:alternative element is independent of multilingual field variants and multi-locale layouts, although it is compatible with the latter. (Support for the former will be possible if I move on a revised Jurism sync encoding scheme that's on the drawing boards.)
  • fbennett
    I think in the end there would need to be some sort of support for these two-element entries in the UI, and in the Zotero database schema. Could maybe be done with a directional relation, when that becomes possible. Data could then be shipped to the citeproc module in whatever form it is able to grok.
  • michael.steinmez
    I'm having the same issue. I'm citing completed works compiled in an anthology.

    I hope Zotero formally supports this soon
  • iswaryaval
    Hi!

    Has this bookinbook issue been sorted out? I'm searching through the forums and just landed on this thread. This is needed in the MLA style too and it's a pretty common use-case in literature/language fields. It would be an immensely useful addition.

    I'm pretty a code-illiterate end user and am not sure how to implement the solutions suggested in this thread (and I'm afraid of messing up).
  • bwiernik
    We’ve adopted the convention that a book with a container-title is recognized as a book in an anthology. You can enter this in Extra like this:
    Container title: Title of anthology

    Styles that are programmed to handle this will pick it up.
  • iswaryaval
    Hi bwiernik!

    Thanks for the suggestion. I tried changing the listing to book instead of book section with my MLA 8 style and got this citation with the double quotes still around the title:

    Stoppard, Tom. “Arcadia.” 1993. Plays Five, Faber, 1999, pp. 1–137.

    I did this by adding the following in Extra:

    "pages: 1-137
    original-date: 1993
    container-title: Plays Five"

    This citation output is exactly the same as what I got earlier when I defined the item as a book section.

    What I need instead is:
    Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia. 1993. Plays Five, Faber, 1999, pp. 1–137.

    Is the MLA 8 not picking up the difference or is there some step I have omitted?
  • bwiernik
    I don’t think the MLA style has been updated to handle books in anthologies yet
  • iswaryaval
    @bwiernik Thanks for letting me know!

    Actually if this was only the bibliography entry, I'd just manually fix it in my document and say no more about it. But then, the short title would keep turning up all over my document with double quotes in the in-text citations. I wonder if there is any other workaround? Has anyone solved this any other way that is not too complicated?
  • bwiernik
    The MLA style should be updated at some point, so I would just ignore it for now.
  • maier.de
    @iswaryaval I've had a quick look. This style should do what you need: https://gist.github.com/denismaier/0b44ef4d16f0e27d7696af53682319ba

    I haven't tested it. Does it work as expected?
  • iswaryaval
    edited June 23, 2020
    @maier.de

    Thank you for sharing this. I'm afraid I don't know how to properly use the link you have shared.

    I tried copy-pasting the code into my style editor and ran this. It's saved under a new name and when I applied it, the citation came out perfect. Is that all I should do? Will this change be retained for other entries too? Sorry for sounding this ignorant. I'm a bit of a noob here.
  • damnation
    If you have zotero open and the connector installed, then this should be recognised.
    https://gist.githubusercontent.com/denismaier/0b44ef4d16f0e27d7696af53682319ba/raw/464a54bf075f9bb860417df7c856b19680d8056f/mla-with-bookinbook

    Otherwise, right click on it, save as..., add .csl to the filename and install the .csl file with a double click (or via the Zotero preferences).
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