Multilingual Support intergration
I work across multiple languages and I imagine many of us do. Using non-Roman scripts often means having to offer translations/transcriptions (as per Chicago or MLA style, and many other styles). There's virtually no support for this kind of thing across citation software, except the Juris-M branch of Zotero, which makes me think Zotero might be the best platform to accommodate this kind of feature.
Is there any interest/possibility among Zotero developers to work on porting/creating add-on/plugin support for multilingual Zotero? I suppose it would mean bringing in some of the Juris-M solutions into it; is Frank Bennett still active with the Zotero community? His solution is still what is widely recommended by East Asia libraries in the US, for instance.
At any rate, I really hope more robust multilingual support can be integrated into mainline Zotero 6, which seems to have some amazing features with markdown support etc. It just seems to me, that given the globalizing intellectual environment, multilingual support really should be a priority!
Of course, I understand this is not necessarily easy or straight forward to do, esp. given staffing/time/priorities/funding... but I wonder: what would it take to make it happen? Grants? institutional support? additional team member? support from a library? faculty involvement?
Is there any interest/possibility among Zotero developers to work on porting/creating add-on/plugin support for multilingual Zotero? I suppose it would mean bringing in some of the Juris-M solutions into it; is Frank Bennett still active with the Zotero community? His solution is still what is widely recommended by East Asia libraries in the US, for instance.
At any rate, I really hope more robust multilingual support can be integrated into mainline Zotero 6, which seems to have some amazing features with markdown support etc. It just seems to me, that given the globalizing intellectual environment, multilingual support really should be a priority!
Of course, I understand this is not necessarily easy or straight forward to do, esp. given staffing/time/priorities/funding... but I wonder: what would it take to make it happen? Grants? institutional support? additional team member? support from a library? faculty involvement?
I notice that somewhere else in the comments it is said [Juris-M] is no longer being updated and Zotero 5 and 6 databases will no longer sync at some point. this is very worrying!
We can likely accommodate adding a translation to foreign-language titles within the current Zotero framework, but this would require separate citation styles (though only lightly modified & could arguably in the main style for things like MLA & Chicago) and be nowhere close to as flexible as Juris-M's multilingual integration.
I don't have anything on the other questions, though generally speaking, adding massive new features is not just a money question: it's necessarily going to take up a good chunk of core development attention so it would need to be a development priority (unless it's possible as an add-on, which I'm skeptical about, but otoh, the Better BibTeX add-on does show that you can push those quite far)
From what I can tell, Juris M creates "extra" fields (all listed in extra in the vanilla Zotero database) that are tagged as alternatives to titles, authors, publisher etc. They are also tagged according to language codes (en for English, ja for Japanese etc) And there is an extra functionality that allows you to choose which one of these "alternatives" get exported. At least for my purposes:
1. the ability to have alternative language fields for bibliographic information
2. the ability to toggle which fields are used (or not used) when creating citations/bibliography
3. the ability to mark what language these fields are in
Would really all that would be necessary; the default Zotero citation styles seem to work perfectly fine with Juris-M in that case.
It seems Frank has already developed the basic code for this-- is there a particular reason why this can't be an add-on or plugin?
Because of the recent great improvements of Zotero (PDF annotations ...), which are seemingly not adopted by Juris-M in the near future, I am considering to move back to Zotero. If Zotero integrated such multilingual support, I would be extremely grateful!
I do not need all the complicated legal support of Juris-M. Maybe these two projects (multilingual / legal support) could be discussed and implemented independent from each other?
This might be something to pursue through an NEH grant in collaboration with a non-Western book historian.
@sw2090 is right that this is a major impediment to Zotero adoption.
I was an early adopted of the multilingual Zotero fork back in the day, and I loved it. I was sorry to see it go.
And while I am genuinely amazed at the work of my former colleague, Frank Bennett, Juris-M will never be Zotero unless something enormous changes.
For now, my workaround is to have separate entries in each language. I'm fortunate that the only Asian language I regularly work with is Japanese, so this is a relatively minor issue for me. However, I'm definitely in a shrinking minority as a younger generation of polyglots wrestle with 5, 6, and sometimes more non-alphabetic scripts to produce richer and better sourced scholarship than ever before. It would be fantastic if Zotero could support them.
I used Zotero throughout my doctoral program and towards the end in 2017, I started using Juris-M/Multingual Zotero.
Even now, I still use the "Jurism" version of Zotero for reference management.
I just did a test of creating a bibliography from a multilingual item and it still works fine for me.
Everything except the special multilingual fields sync to a vanilla Zotero library in the cloud. When I log and view my library online (via the Zotero site), all my sources with multilingual fields are there like normal entries, but the special multilingual fields from Jurism are listed in the "Extra" section.
So, as far as I can tell, Jurism is still a good option in the meantime.
The wide variety of existing plugins shows that there's no reason someone should need to maintain a separate fork of Zotero for this.
We're happy to provide whatever technical support we can to make it easier to hook into the necessary places in Zotero.
@dstillman when you say "we" do you mean the Zotero team?
unfortunately, I'm not personally equipped to do this kind of work, but it is possible for me to try to scrounge up the necessary resources to make it possible. i.e. university support (I'm at UCLA), apply for grants etc....
Is the this forum the best place to launch this discussion?
Even if you could get funding without a developer on board, which seems unlikely, I think it would be short-sighted to line up development funding without a longer-term maintenance plan. Someone has to want this and want to do this, just as with every plugin on the plugins page.
But I guess I'll just leave this point up here; if there's someone out in the void who would be interested in/capable of this undertaking, there's enough people out there who would work to make sure it is supported.
Without the capacity to handle all these variations, Zotero is not just useful enough for scholars who work with/in these languages, who as noted above are more and more numerous. Juris-M is/was. If this functionality can be replicated with a plugin, ideally one that can also read/convert old Juris-M fields, I would certainly support it--and I expect that some institutions might as well.
Understandably the development team at Zotero does not have infinite resources, but the integration of multilingual features as a default standard would be greatly appreciated.
I should say that Frank Bennett is also dealing with some extended personal family matters and has not been as active in the last few months for that reason. I do believe he has a development team though am not sure.
Hopefully I am not coming across a promoting my own research - but the need for a multilingual plugin is definitely there. I looked into multilingual scholarship and Reference Management Software use back in 2018 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2017.12.001 - I only offer my own article as it may be helpful to clarify the need for multilingual support.
Edit: I was informed some couldn't access the link, here is the approved preprint version I'm allowed to share out: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Shvm1zBiIsMmr-SbxSJNZ9gX7B0CixwU/view?usp=sharing
A bunch of us are currently in discussion to see how we can strategize making this more robust; I just hope at some point we can get someone at Zotero to talk to us in earnest about how to make this work. We'll be in touch...
It would be great if it could be updated to join the Zotero 6 platform. Alternatively, if all these features could fit into a plugin, that would work too. The problem appears to be that nobody who knows enough legal citation also knows enough coding to do this, and Frank's not being able to work on it any longer is likely to kill Juris-M.
My question is, can the Zotero folks take this up as an addition, or can we find some way to crowd-fund the continuation of Juris-M?