Translation of Titles

DR_DANI1987
Hello to all!

I am a historian and use Zotero since a five or six years. Although it is the best RFS, I am missing a really important field: Translation of titles.

My main sources are Slavic and Hungarian. When writing an article, I always have to translate the titles at least when first quoting it and in the bibliography. It would look like that:

V. István Király, Filozófia és itt-lét. Tanulmányok [= Philosophy and Being. Studies] (Cluj: Erdélyi Híradó, 1999).

The solution is for articles to enter the translation in the very last step manually. Yet, this is a bad solution as you can imagine.

For books, however, it doesn't work. Having a few thousand footnotes, I cannot manually insert translations. Chances are too high to miss one, that there will be a change at the end and Zotero screws all the manual changes... etc.

My question would be, since I'm not the only researcher in human studies having this problem, if it would be possible for Zotero to provide an optional field for translations of titles? Or perhaps there is already something like that, I'm just not seeing it...

Thank you so much for you help in advance!

Best wishes!
  • RokStergar
    I agree, this is really missing from zotero. And we really need a dedicated field, because many historians do not only publish in English. That is why we need the translation in one article, but do not need it in the next one, and saving it in the title field--square brackets and all--does not solve the problem.

    Also, not all the languages treat places of publication the same. In English you mostly have to use the English name--if there is one--while many other languges use the name used in the book istelf.

    Hence (Vienna, 2007) in English, but (Wien, 2007) in German or Slovene.
  • adamsmith
    Have a look at https://juris-m.github.io/ if multilingual features are important. It's a Zotero fork with added support for legal and multi-lingual writing.

    Zotero might get an original title field, but as you'll see looking at juris-m, that's hardly enough: Do you need translation, transliteration, both? Do you need this for the title or for other fields as well? etc. etc. Unlikely this sort of more robust support will make it to Zotero any time soon.
  • DR_DANI1987
    Thank you Adam!

    In my years of publishing, it would be simply enough if proving a field for title and - if it is a collective volume – of the book title. Never done translation of a journal name, series etc.

    And transliteration is no problem. You would be it in the brackets before the translation, so in the field of translation.

    E. g.: ασδ [asd / translation], rest of quotation. It is really not that hard to do...
  • adamsmith
    In my years of publishing, it would be simply enough if proving a field for title and - if it is a collective volume – of the book title. Never done translation of a journal name, series etc.
    OK, so now we're at two fields. For non-Latin alphabets, it's not unusual to transliterate authors, for example, especially for languages like Chinese or Japanese, where characters are completely unrecognizable to non-speakers. So now we're at three fields, one of them with potentially multiple entries.
    And transliteration is no problem. You would be it in the brackets before the translation, so in the field of translation.
    That's what you prefer -- but isn't unusual for some publications to include just the one or just the other, so for that, the above three fields double to six. And this doesn't even take into account different norms for how people would like that information displayed, which means an endless proliferation of citation styles.

    This really isn't a trivial problem to even provide a decent solution for that doesn't cause as many problems as it solves. juris-m put a lot of thought into this and has what I think is a nice implementation, so do look at that.
  • RokStergar
    Thanks for the tip--and I do appreciate it isn't a trivial problem. Yet it is also something that affects a good number of scholars, and is something that--obviously--can be solved.

    I've read the info on juris-m web page and am extremely reluctant to switch. It might be a fork of zotero, but it is not zotero and lacks some of its features--the browser plugin for one, if I got that right.

    That is why I really hope that zotero will implement at least some of the things we've talked about here.
  • adamsmith
    I've read the info on juris-m web page and am extremely reluctant to switch. It might be a fork of zotero, but it is not zotero and lacks some of its features--the browser plugin for one, if I got that right.
    it's up to you, but the browser add-ons for juris-m are the same.

    Beyond that, the status is very likely what I said above: There's a good chance for an original-title field that you could use in styles (and in fact you can, already, using original-title: Title of the work in the Extra field), but getting that to show in citations requires customizing citation styles, both now and likely in the future. Developers have been fairly clear at least in the past that any additional work on this is not a priority.
  • emilianoeheyns
    Also, Frank (the author of Juris-M) actively tracks changes in Zotero. It's not a fork as in "went their separate ways long ago", it's more "whenever a new version of Zotero comes out, I add the Juris-M changes to them". This is the reason that the browser plugins for Zotero just work for Juris-M (although I wonder how the different port is detected or configured). Stuff that gets added/changed in Zotero usually shows up in Juris-M soon after.
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