Citing original documents and their translations in parenthetical citations

Hi everyone,

I am kind of new to Zotero (awesome tool, recommend), and I would like to know how to create a parenthetical citation that would look like this: (Piaget, 1970/1972) where 1970 is the publication date of the original in French, and 1972 the publication date of the English translation. Apparently (source: https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/citing-translated-works), this is how you cite an original and its translation, at least in the APA format. I couldn't really find a clear answer for other formats. Anyway, how I can include the slash?

Also, I don't know how to do it with page numbers. Is it supposed to be like this: (Piaget, 1970, 145/1972, 168)?. What I've done so far was to create entries for the original and its translation, which then appear as: (Piaget, 1970, 145; 1972, 168), but the original and translation appear as two different references instead of one (and of course if I include in the same in-text citation 2+ references to 2+ different original publications and their 2+ translations, it gets even more confusing). Additionally, is there a way to associate the original and its translation(s) in Zotero's library, or do I have to do it manually? Do I have to use the "extra" field as I've seen some suggesting? should it be done with the suffix feature?

Thank you for your help.
  • edited October 20, 2023
    Two different items will be just treated like two different items.
    You can add the original issue date into the extra field like so and citations style that support it will pick it up:
    original-date: 1970
    original-publisher: X
    original-title: y
    original-publisher-place: z

    And of course you can add the translators and such to the names list up top.
  • Thank you for your reply. Yeah, I guess this is the way to do it.
    I still think that having two separate entries and then associating them would be much more simple to handle than using the extra field. But I guess it's not an option. I will need to try what you instructed to see how it looks.
  • OK I have tried and the citation style that I am using now (Chicago) picks up the date to put it in the parenthetical citation, as you said it would. I did the same with APA and it worked too. In Chicago, it looks like this:
    1) (Randall [1970] 1995, 45)
    2) Randall, James. (1970) 1995. La psychologie de l’enfant. Translated by Maurice Dupont. Les fondamentaux de la psychologie 16. Paris: Aubier.
    (the sources are purely fictional)

    But I have two problems here:
    1/ The parenthetical citation does not allow me to include a page for the original document. What's the point of citing the original then? 2/3 of the sources I work with are articles or books written in German and translated to English/French, and I have to cite both versions (page included).
    2/ The bibliography reference does not include any information regarding the original document (title, publisher, place) apart from the author and date. Isn't there a better way? Because "Randall, James. (1970)" is not enough for me to find the original source if I need it.

    Maybe it's because the citation styles were poorly designed, and nothing connected to Zotero, I don't really know the rules in details.
  • If you're using both sources, you should actually cite both sources separately. Using original-date is intended for a situtation where you're just using the newer work but want to clarify that it's actually an older work.
  • Yeah? Is that so? Thank you for your comment, AdamSmith. I don't really know where to look to confirm all this, but I'll try to find that.
  • Trust @adamsmith regarding the Chicago citation style. He is an expert, an authority. In this case, the only way he can be giving you incorrect advice is if you are submitting to an institution that is demanding a modified Chicago style.
  • Thank you @dwl-sdca for the credentials.
    @adamsmith, just to clarify: did you mean having two separate entries, for the original and its translation, on Zotero as well as in the inserted bibliography, and two items in the parenthetical citation, separated by a semicolon?

    Assuming a fictional character named James Randall published a book in English in 1995 that was translated to French by a certain Maurice Dunoyer in 1999. When I cite them both, I get the following in-text citation:

    (Randall 1995, 34; 1999, 45)

    and the bibliography looks like this:

    Randall, James. 1995. Children’s Psychology. London: Macmillan.
    ———. 1999. La psychologie de l’enfant. Translated by Maurice Dunoyer. Psychologie et avenir. Paris: Aubier.

    Is that correct?
  • I'd tend to say that the type of work where critically working with multiple editions is important lends itself well to author-date styles, so I'd typically suggest using footnotes, but if you do want to use it in author-date format, you'd want to annotate it in the citation (using prefix/suffix) as appropriate, such as
    (Randall 1995, 34; see also the French translation 1999, 45)
    But for a scientific (rather than a literary) work, you should ask yourself why you want this information included. Why not just cite the one edition -- either the French translation, or the English original -- that you're presumably relying upon? Citations are supposed to serve a function: why should your readers care about these details? If there's a strong reason they should, see above. I suspect in 90+% of psychology there isn't and you should just use the standard original-date citation.
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