Problems with Display Chicago Manual of style in german
Hi,
I‘m using Zotero 2.0b6.3 with Firefox 3.5.1 and NeoOffice 3.0 patch 5 on a Mac with Mac OS 10.5.7. I use „Chicago Manual of style (Note with bibliography)” in german language.
I‘ve got 2 Problems with the display of the citation and the bibliography.
1. In the foornote the comma is in the wrong place, when the title of the document is in quotation marks:
143 Heyse, “Strategien – Kompetenzanforderungen – Potentialanalysen,” 25.
And it should be:
Heyse, “Strategien – Kompetenzanforderungen – Potentialanalysen”, 25.
2. The second problem is in the bibliography. When the quoted book has an edition entry the bibliography entry shows a „undefined” after the Number of the edition. Example:
Bortz, Jürgen, und Nicola Döring. Forschungsmethoden und Evaluation für Human- und Sozialwissenschaftler. 4undefined Aufl. Berlin: Springer, 2006.
How can I solve these problems? Thanks a lot for your help!
Gruesse, Pablo
I‘m using Zotero 2.0b6.3 with Firefox 3.5.1 and NeoOffice 3.0 patch 5 on a Mac with Mac OS 10.5.7. I use „Chicago Manual of style (Note with bibliography)” in german language.
I‘ve got 2 Problems with the display of the citation and the bibliography.
1. In the foornote the comma is in the wrong place, when the title of the document is in quotation marks:
143 Heyse, “Strategien – Kompetenzanforderungen – Potentialanalysen,” 25.
And it should be:
Heyse, “Strategien – Kompetenzanforderungen – Potentialanalysen”, 25.
2. The second problem is in the bibliography. When the quoted book has an edition entry the bibliography entry shows a „undefined” after the Number of the edition. Example:
Bortz, Jürgen, und Nicola Döring. Forschungsmethoden und Evaluation für Human- und Sozialwissenschaftler. 4undefined Aufl. Berlin: Springer, 2006.
How can I solve these problems? Thanks a lot for your help!
Gruesse, Pablo
2. I can't reproduce this.
What it does for me, though, which isn't right either, is to say
"Bortz, Jürgen, und Nicola Döring. Forschungsmethoden und Evaluation für Human- und Sozialwissenschaftler. 4th Aufl. Berlin: Springer, 2006."
Which Firefox are you using? Maybe a Swiss or an Austrian version?
Can you try what happens if you change the hidden local option to de-DE ?
http://www.zotero.org/support/hidden_prefs#export_and_citation_settings
But the problem is clear - ordinal numbers aren't translated properly by the German locale (this should just read 4. Aufl. in German, equally for all numbers). The translation is done through Babelzilla, I've posted on the forum thread relating to Zotero there, maybe they will be able to help.
http://www.babelzilla.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=2328&st=100
thanks for your reply.
1. Honestly I'm not too shure about the comma, but I've never seen it before. It looks strange to me, especially when there's a question mark at the end of the title. Perhaps the Chicago manual of style is just not matching. We're a small university and pretty free to use what style we want. The CMOS just seemed to came close to what I'm used to. Perhaps I correct it by hand, perhaps I just leave like it is. Since it is a official style, it should be ok.
„this should just read 4. Aufl. in German, equally for all numbers"
2. Sometimes it's modified like „4. aktualisierte Aufl." or „3. erweiterte Aufl." The best would be, to do nothing more than a „.” at the end of the string in the bibliography entry.
I tried the „de” locale, did not change anything. I'm using the german Firefox anyway.
Gruesse, Pablo
2. Right, I think "erweiterte auflage" etc. would be hard to do (and I belienve usually not required by citation styles), so I agree this should just be 3., 4. etc. Unfortunately, until this is fixed, I don't really have any good advice for you. I think I would not put anything in the Edition/Aufl. field and add it by hand in the document until this is fixed. I have never had anything to do with language issues so I can't tell you if this is something likely to happen soon or not.
Edit: as an alternative (_very_ provisional) option you could write the Auflage as part of the Publisher - in the item itself. But that only works if you only work in German and only in Chicago Style. I'm not saying this is a solution of any kind, I'm just thinking about ways to make this workable until a real solution comes about.
Gruesse, Pablo
I'm the German translator for Zotero. Your two problems are not an issue of the translation of the extension but of the bibliographic style. These are two separate matters. The solution would be to create a separate "Chicaco-german" CSL style that takes into account the German rules. AFAIK CSL does not support multiple language styles in the sense that comma rules or similar are changed according to a user's language prefs.
So there are two solutions:
-switch to a citation style that works with German. I don't really remember which ones do work but a forum search might help)
-copy and modify the Chicago style file in accordance to your wishes. Since the changes are somewhat minor that shouldn't be too hard if you have a basic understanding of CSL/XML.
HTH,
Harald.
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/4937/multilingual-styles-and-dateformat/
So with the CSL people there is awareness of the problem and maybe there will be a fundamental solution at some point but it's better not to hold your breath.
I understand why this is the case for problem number 1 - but why is this true for problem number 2? Is the treatment of ordinal numbers not part of the translation file?
If so, that's really quite unfortunate, because they are very much in English, so this would be an issue in any language...
@CSL knowledgeables - is there any way to fix this? I wouldn't even know how to get the comma out of the quotation marks, let alone deal with the ordinal suffix.
I'll try to do this and prepare the style for upload at some later point, but to fix the Aufl. thing, what you want to do is to find in the csl
this passage:
<if is-numeric="edition">
<group delimiter=" ">
<number variable="edition" form="ordinal"/>
<text term="edition" form="short" suffix="."/>
</group>
</if>
and change it to this:
<if is-numeric="edition">
<group delimiter=" ">
<number variable="edition" suffix="."/>
<text term="edition" form="short" suffix="."/>
</group>
</if>
If someone would now have advice on how to fix the comma thing we'd have ourselves a Chicago Style German
Winner, Langdon. “Do Artefacts Have Politics?.” In The Social Shaping of Technology, herausgegeben von Donald MacKenzie und Judy Wajcman, 28-40. 2. Aufl. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1999.
So the edition is correct, the punctuation isn't. The only explanation I have for the different results is different versions of the style. Unfortunately, the style file doesn't contain version or date information. (If the file metadata is to be trusted: my CSL file [chicago-fullnote-bibliography.csl] was created 2009-02-24, modified 2009-04-27). Maybe both of you should try re-installing the latest version of the CSL file and report on the results.
WRT punctuation: As you can see in the above example, even the English style doesn't get it quite right (title ending in question mark produces additional period). Maybe someone can contact the style's authors and ask them for a fix. Once that has been done it shouldn't be too difficult -- even for me with my sucky knowledge of CSL -- to create a German version.
Harald.
http://pablolachmann.de/chicago-fullnote-bibliography.csl
Gruesse, Pablo
Bortz, Jürgen, und Nicola Döring. Forschungsmethoden und Evaluation für Human- und Sozialwissenschaftler. 4undefined Aufl. Berlin: Springer, 2006.
It's obviously not a NeoOffice plugin problem. I'll check with another user, importing the database from a file.
EDIT: Checked it with a second user account, new Firebird Settings, new Zotero Installation with the database imported. Same „undefined”-string. Already had the problem before using FF 3.5.
EDIT2: Did the same on a Windows XP virtual machine. Is my database corrupted?
Gruesse, Pablo
Just a thought: are you both running Firefox with exactly the same locale settings? I ask because this looks like the CSL processor is missing a locale string (or empty locale string) that should go at that location, and the processor locale file is (I've heard) controlled by the Firefox locale settings.
general.useragent.locale;de
Gruesse, Pablo
My question about the locale settings might have been a mis-cue. I had forgotten that Zotero currently derives its ordinal strings from elsewhere. I'm afraid that I don't remember clearly what the ultimate source of the strings was, but there is at least a possibility that the difference in operating systems (Mac OS 10.5.7 vs. Windows Vista) may also be an issue.
I'm a Linux user myself, so at this point I should probably bow out of this conversation before my interjections become a cause of confusion.
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
Gruesse, Pablo
Frank - any idea on how to get the comma out of the quotation marks?
Palmann - before you spend to much time trying to fix the ordinals, I suggest you implement the quick fix to the CS I describe above.
Here is a quick description on how to change a .csl and put it back into Zotero:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/5104/modifying-word-plugin-using-journal-abbreviation-instead-of-publication-name/#Item_2
Gruesse, Pablo
@Adam: Which language version of FF you have installed doesn't matter. Strings like ed./hrsg. etc. are taken from the language specific files that are controlled by the user agent locale setting. No matter which FF version you have installed. With very recent citation styles that use fields that have been defined only in the most recent version of Zotero, the "undefined" problem could indeed arise as there is no German localization for Zotero yet. But this apparently wasn't the issue here.
@fbennett: Thanks for the info.