Hi all,
OJS will always present “official” metadata, whether or not it’s in translation/transliteration, since it’s not the citing author providing the translation/transliteration – it’s the article’s author or the journal’s editor.
Here are some concrete examples of multilingual citations “from the horse’s mouth” (i.e. APA, MLA, NLM style guides). These are presented for publication in English from multilingual sources but you can imagine similar examples in other languages.
-
APA:
Piaget, J. (1966). La psychologie de l’enfant [The psychology of the child]. Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France.
- The article title is presented in both English and French.
-
APA:
Motoki, S. (Producer), & Kurosawa, A. (Director). (1954). Shichinin no samurai [Seven samurai; motion picture]. Japan: Toho.
- Individual names are presented in transliteration to Latin characters.
- The item name is presented in transliteration to Latin and translation to English, but not in e.g. Hiragana script.
-
MLA:
Tolstoy, Leo. Дневники 1895, 1896 г [Dnevniki 1895, 1896 g.; Diaries for the years 1895, 1986]. Tolstoy, Лев Толстой [Lev Tolstoĭ], vol. 53, p. 4.
- The author name is presented in both Cyrillic and Latin transliteration
- The item name is presented in original, transliteration to Latin, and translation to English
-
NLM (also Vancouver):
Wilkniss SM, Hunter RH, Silverstein SM. [Multimodal treatment of aggression and violence in individuals with psychosis]. Sante Ment Que. 2004 Autumn;29(2):143-74. French.
- The item name is only presented in translation, as indicated with
[]
-
NLM (also Vancouver):
Aouizerate P, Guizard M. Prise en charge des thrombocytopenies induites par l'heparine = Management of heparin-induced thrombocytopenia. Therapie. 2002;57(6):577-88. French, English.
- The item title is included, as per the original, in both languages with a
=
separator
- This form is noted as being particularly relevant for Canadian journals
Clearly no single choice of language – original, translated, or transliterated – will meet all of these needs, particularly in the case of transliteration (Japanese, Cyrillic, etc). But right now – unless I’ve missed something big, which is always possible – the CSL toolset we use to generate citations will only accept a single form of submission title, author name, journal title, etc. So we are forced to choose one; as this thread shows, not everyone will be happy with our choice, but choosing another will just cause frustration within a different segment. We could e.g. glue them all together, but that would be worse yet.
Ideally the CSL toolset (https://citationstyles.org/ for the overall project, GitHub - seboettg/citeproc-php: Full-featured CSL 1.0.1 processor for PHP for the PHP implementation we use) would allow us to pass along metadata in whatever combination of languages/character sets we have, and let the style implementations (APA, NLM, MLA, etc) make use of the best combination according to each style guide. However that isn’t yet the case. There are some relevant discussions:
Until the infrastructure allows for us to deliver the best metadata to the citation generation toolset, giving the reader the ability to choose what language to draw their citations in seems like the least-worst approach. But unless we jettison the CSL toolset and go back to writing our own citation extraction code – this would be a huge regression, in my opinion – we’re stuck with what CSL can support.
I’d encourage everyone who’s interested in this to engage with the CSL community (e.g. at https://discourse.citationstyles.org).
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team