Multi-lingual styles and date-format

haraldkliems

The problems discussed in this thread have led me to investigate the functionality of using English-language styles with non-English output languages in general.



While the localization via the Babelzilla-files in general works quite well, one big problem seems to be the date format: If you set "extensions.zotero.export.bibliographyLocale" to "de-DE" and then create bibliographies in any given standard style, they always get the date wrong -- "November 18, 2002" instead of "18. November 2002".

I don't know much about CSL and so I was wondering if, in principle, this problem can be fixed, i. e. a style would use a date format based on the bibliographyLocale entry. It would be great if this would work, since in practice the wrong dates make a style mostly useless and thus necessitate the creation of language-specific styles.

  • erazlogo
    Unfortunately in English dates can be formatted in different ways for different styles: 18 Nov. 2002; 18 November 2002; or November 18, 2002. As a result, many styles define precisely where the day and month are displayed and whether the month is abbreviated or not. It doesn't seem possible to localize all these cases in CSL.
  • bdarcus
    edited December 3, 2008
    Am I right that the issue here is really access dates?

    There's an inconsistency in CSL that is a consequence of legacy issues where layout for most dates needs to be formally created in the CSL. Those definitions are then, unfortunately, locale-specific. But for access dates, this is not the case.

    Am not really sure what, if anything, to do about this, but we may need to keep an eye on it.
  • haraldkliems
    erazlogo: My question was probably a bit unclear. In general, what I was asking about if CSL allowed any sort of localization, in the sense: "if (language=de-DE) then dateFormatA; elseif (language=en-US) then dateFormatB"... Your and Bruce's answers seem to imply that this is not the case.

    bdarcus: yes and no. Access dates of websites are probably the most common case (and the linked thread is only about them); but there is another case where a full date is required: newpapers (e.g. Harris, G. (2008, December 3). British Balance Benefit vs. Cost of Latest Drugs. The New York Times, A12.)
  • bdarcus
    @HobbesvsBoyle: not sure you're still paying attention, but unfortunately, you've stumbled on a dumb oversight in CSL. I hope we'll fix it sometime soon in both CSL and Zotero. Am not exactly sure how best to do that ATM though; it would be really awkward to have to have a long and complex conditional setup just to get date-handling properly localized.
  • morphiumdeus
    Are you still working on this?
    And in the meantime what would be the best way to change the date format manually?
  • morphiumdeus
    I found A way, not sure if it is a good one:
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/5104/modifying-word-plugin-using-journal-abbreviation-instead-of-publication-name/#Item_3
    follow this guide and modify the "date-accessed"-section.
  • fbennett
    Happy to report that the issues Bruce mentions were resolved by Rintze Zelle and Bruce a couple of months ago, and date localization will be included in CSL 1.0. The processor that supports it (written by yours truly) will probably start appearing in a Zotero development version sometime early next year.
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