Re: i18n in BibTeX

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

Adam Duck wrote:
> So, I've stumbled across a problem: if you have only two authors in a
> BibTeX entry, cont-au.bst sets "AuthorA and AuthorB" which is -- IMHO
> -- unaccaptable for a german document.  I had to manually edit
> cont-au.bst and change a line in
/.../
> from "and" to "und".  Is there a cleaner way?  If I typeset an english
> document now, I'll get an "und"...

Take a look at bibl-apa.tex and bibl-aps.tex.

Depending on what kind of citing you use, you may say something like
	\setupcite[authoryear][lastpubsep={ und }]
and for all the other citing modes the same.

However, there are many hard coded English words present in the style 
(in contrast to the rest of ConTeXt this doesn't support automatic 
language specific behaviour (yet?)). Since there are other specifics for 
German bibliography layout as well, it may even be a good idea to make 
your own style if this one is not OK for you. It's much easier (and 
extremely user-friendly) to modify the layout in Taco's module than 
changing the .bst files.


Since there is already a discussion on this topic:
Someone on "TeX Stammtisch München" asked if it would be possible to use 
an additional field language=something within BibTeX entries, which 
would typeset the authors, titles, ... and everything else in the 
language specified, so that hyphenation are OK and possibly some other 
stuff as well. They stated it approximately like that: "if someone is 
writing a document in Arabic script and wants to cite a German book, 
"publisher", "thesis", "volume", ... must remain in Arabic, but the 
language=de/german field should turn all the German language specifics 
on (writing direction, fonts, hyphenation, ...)".

He mentioned a flavour of BibTeX modification that does that, but I 
don't remember which one. The main problem is that most BibTeX packages 
are not aware of any language other than English and those that are, 
don't offer as wide range of possibilities as the others (shortly: you 
can't combine a fancy BibTeX style and language awareness in LaTeX).


To make this work \insertWhatevers (and much more) should probably be 
redefined to obey language specific behaviour for both the global 
document language and the language specified in the bib Entry if any, 
but I'm afraid that there are also some other tricky details behind.


Mojca