Wish to add a new CHINESE CNKI translator

GrandSoar
Hi,

I'm a scholar in P.R.China. I'm interested in your Zotero and have recommended to lots of my colleagues. But as time went on, we really feel inconvenient when doing projects using our mother language: Chinese! Zotero is an English language based software, without considering bibliographic database in other language.

At the end of the year 2008, there are 2663 universities and colleges, 317 research institutions, 2.9 million students of undergraduates, graduates, PhDs in China,[1] not to mention how many scholars, professors are there.

What do the bibliography manager software so many people use, I don't know. But it is no doubt that Zotero can only occupy very small market share. Why?

In China, we always use http://www.cnki.net(the largest and most used), http://www.wanfangdata.com.cn/, http://www.cqvip.com/, and some other smaller bibliographic database. The issue is that there does NOT any Zotero translators support any Chinese bibliographic databases. So we have no choice but give up Zotero one day, maybe.

Please do some market research about Chinese academia. So many people wish to support our databases.

Thanks for reading and waiting for kindly replay.

Reference:
[1]http://www.moe.edu.cn/edoas/website18/34/info1247820433389334.htm

Best Regards!
  • ajlyon
    My understanding is that Zotero's interface should be in Chinese already, so long as you are using a Chinese version of Firefox.

    As for support for citation styles and bibliographic databases in wide use in China, that's something that to some degree will require the help of interested Chinese scholars and students. Site translators for bibliographic databases are often written by interested users with basic programming skills (really quite basic). For citation styles, they can be written by any interested person who is willing to read the documentation. In both cases, knowledge of both Chinese and English will be necessary to dissect the database websites and to design the appropriate styles.

    Please keep in mind that Zotero is an open-source project driven in large part by user interest and volunteer developers-- if there are any questions that arise as you try to develop translators or styles, post to the forum and people will be glad to help out.
  • fbennett
    @GrandSoar,

    Some features of the citation processor that will come out later this year will be useful to Chinese users. But they weren't put in there with a view to expanding market share; they were included because I figure they will be useful to me (and to my students). Many contributions to Zotero are the end product of similar acts of benevolent selfishness.

    As ajlyon suggests, expansion of translator support for Chinese sites is likely to be driven mainly from within China and Chinese-speaking communities. If you want translators for the sites you mention, they would be a welcome addition to the stable. Anyone with programming skills and an interest is welcome to submit.
  • GrandSoar
    I found that @Bruce Rusk had brought up the issue on Dec 14th 2007
    URL:http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/15/5/which-site-translators-would-you-like-to-see/

    I also found two useful translators for CNKI and Douban(another popular site in China)

    http://fayaa.com/code/view/667/
    &
    http://fayaa.com/code/view/666/

    But they are all invalid now.
  • ajlyon
    Perhaps the people who wrote the CNKI and Douban translators are still around? Could they be convinced to try again, perhaps asking for help here on the forums?

    This isn't really that hard to do in most cases, but the person writing a translator really does need to know the languages involved, so I can't work on it. I would be glad to offer advice if someone is working on some new translators and can't get them to function correctly-- just post here on the forums.
  • GrandSoar
    I'll try to contact to the author to see whether he could develop a updated version.
  • lyniayan
    Hi, I am a Chinese user, just following GrandSoar to have some more suggestion of Chinese website.

    I find out that Amazon.cn fails to work these days ~and also, if possible, please try to release the translator for Douban.com Those two sites can cover most popular books in P.R.China's book market. Both of them are good supplement to Google Book.

    Hope for your kind reply.
  • ajlyon
    Douban should be working -- it was added to Zotero back in October, with a new version in December.

    Perhaps the Douban update wasn't pushed to 2.0.9 clients?
  • lyniayan
    Hi, ajlyon,
    my zotero is the latest one, version2.1rc2 and now Douban does not work on it~~
  • dstillman
    Douban wasn't pushed to 2.0.9 clients, but the December version is definitely in 2.1.
  • DWL-SDCA
    Is there any interest in fixing the CNKI translator? I use the site but need to hand enter citations.
  • adamsmith
    If I remember correctly, the site is Chinese, no?
    If there is an English version, I can do this, but otherwise this is too much (guess) work.
    Writing a screen scraper is not terribly hard, you could probably learn that in half a day, if you're interested.
  • DWL-SDCA
    There is a partial English interface but all the background seems to be in Chinese. I use the site for those articles with English titles and abstracts. I will see if I can find someone at my institution who can give a better idea of what can be done. I'll post back but not right away.

    @adamsmith After your personal announcement, each day I keep expecting you to not be online for a while.
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