Language field and imported bibliography (multilingual)
Dear all,
I have read all I could find about language field but I wanted to make sure I ad the most updated info.
When importing books from library catalogue, the language field is intended as the content language, and in my case is often two or more (eng, lat - it,gr) with very different possibilities. I was searching for standards and I realized that the Zotero "language" field is intended for storing just one language according to iso standards (en-GB, it-IT) in order to help with citation formatting (i.e. capitalization).
Now my problem. My Zotero bibliography is multilingual and intended for multilingual publication. So, after creating a multilingual CSL (planned) I should be able to:
-> format the bibliography according to a given locale (en-GB) regardless of the title language:
Because if manually corecting all my language fields won't change anything in the rendition of bibliographic records, I will give up and leave them as they were inserted by librarians. If it's worth it, I will start correcting them now and prepare a CSL accordingly.
I have read all I could find about language field but I wanted to make sure I ad the most updated info.
When importing books from library catalogue, the language field is intended as the content language, and in my case is often two or more (eng, lat - it,gr) with very different possibilities. I was searching for standards and I realized that the Zotero "language" field is intended for storing just one language according to iso standards (en-GB, it-IT) in order to help with citation formatting (i.e. capitalization).
Now my problem. My Zotero bibliography is multilingual and intended for multilingual publication. So, after creating a multilingual CSL (planned) I should be able to:
-> format the bibliography according to a given locale (en-GB) regardless of the title language:
->format each item according to the locale language stored in Zotero (it-IT)Biondo, Flavio, 2017. Italia Illustrata. Edited by Paolo Pontari. Vol. 3. 3 vols. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Biondo Flavio, 4.3. Roma: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo.
I tested the API with chicago-author-date but if I remove the locale=it-IT from my request everithing falls back to English. I was wondering: is this something I can encode in the CSL? to use the document locale? Or will the locale always be forced by the transformation?Biondo, Flavio. 2017. Italia Illustrata. A cura di Paolo Pontari. Vol. 3. 3 voll. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Biondo Flavio, 4.3. Roma: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo.
Because if manually corecting all my language fields won't change anything in the rendition of bibliographic records, I will give up and leave them as they were inserted by librarians. If it's worth it, I will start correcting them now and prepare a CSL accordingly.
You can create multilingual CSL for multi-lingual bibliographies as you describe in your second example, but that's a CSL extension that's only officially part of Juris-m and isn't included in (nor would be accepted for) any of the official CSL style, though it does work with Zotero.
I am in charge of digital publications for an Art History institute with a long history of publications (in Italian, German and English but with contens in French, Spanish and more) and legacy editorial rules.
I am planning to store my main editorial bibliographic records in our Zotero Lab groups and to convince my colleagues and researchers to use a reference manager I will need to make the editorial rules (or something very similar) available through a CSL. While for digital publishing I can imagine choosing the locale to the article/paper one for online rendition of bibliography on the fly (which is why I'm testing the API), I am also trying to appeal the print editors by offering the same functionalities they are painfully achieving by hand. Unfortunately my preferred reference manager is Citavi, so I am slowly adapting to Zotero and CSL for the sake of compatibility (which is also why I keep on making strange questions).
And I think I have answered the multinlingual part of the question -- that does work when you have correct metadata in the language field, though with the limitations described (Zotero will warn that the CSL style doesn't validate on import and it wouldn't be acceptable as part of the CSL (and thus Zotero) style repository.
https://api.zotero.org/groups/4999676/items?tag=hsah:0105&format=bib&locale=it-IT&style=chicago-author-date&linkwrap=1
So, about the multilingual, if I really need to do that with a CSL, I can do it with a local repo but not upload it. I will think about it if they really want it that way, just making the multilingual CSL will be a *lot* of work!
See
Görz, Günther, Chiara Seidl, e Martin Thiering. 2022. «Linked Biondo: Generating and Processing Research Data Based on Geographical Feature Modeling». In Walking through History. An Interdisciplinary Approach to Flavio Biondo’s Spaces in the «Italia Illustrata», a cura di Tanja Michalsky e Martin Thiering. Hertziana Studies in Art History. Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History. https://doi.org/10.48431/hsah.0102.
with your API call (removing italics)
vs.
Görz, Günther, Chiara Seidl, and Martin Thiering. 2022. “Linked Biondo: Generating and Processing Research Data Based on Geographical Feature Modeling.” In Walking through History. An Interdisciplinary Approach to Flavio Biondo’s Spaces in the “Italia Illustrata,” edited by Tanja Michalsky and Martin Thiering. Hertziana Studies in Art History. Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History. https://doi.org/10.48431/hsah.0102.
with the locale removed
So in a document seeking publication, which references other documents written in a variety of other languages, those references would use the style required by the publisher of the new document, rather than the typical typographic styles used in the language in which the references were written.
This is e.g. part of the national citation standards in China (GT/T7714) and Russia (GOST), but also not uncommon in countries in Latin America and Southern Europe.
(and no, I don't see why you'd need separate items for this)
So in my Italian article, instead of it should be