Answered By: Keely Wilczek
Last Updated: Mar 14, 2024     Views: 415

When it comes to formatting citations, one of the many helpful features of Zotero is its ability to switch from sentence case to title case if that is required by the citation style in use. (The Chicago Manual of Style, for example, requires title case for the titles of books, journals articles, etc.) However, this automatic conversion to title case is designed with English-language titles in mind; according to most citation styles, capitalization of non-English titles is supposed to follow the rules and conventions of that other language.

So how do you let Zotero know that a citation is not in English? 

It's easy: Each citation record in Zotero contains a field for language; simply add the language of the item to that field a combination of two-letter ISO language code (ISO 639-1) and two-letter ISO country code (ISO 3166-1). (The language code alone should do if the correct country code is difficult to determine.) 

For example:

  • Book chapter in Spanish: 

     
  • Journal article in English: 

     
  • Book in Dutch: 

     

 

 
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