Use Latin forms with italics or French forms in french.lbx

[cmfwyp]

See #552 for context.

[moewew]

Regarding the use of italics for Latin terms normally I would prefer not to include \mkbibemph in the bibstrings themselves, but rather to redefine \mkibid which is used by all standard styles to typeset scholarly Latin abbreviations such as ibidem etc.

This would not work very well for 'et al.', though. Since there is precedence for putting \mkbibemph in bibstrings directly (biblatex-ieee does this) and since the usage of italics with Latin seems to be compulsory in French (and not just a style issue) I would probably be OK with putting \mkbibemph into the bibstrings directly.

I welcome comments on this issue as well.

[moewew]

@cmfwyp @dbitouze @Evpok Is there anything to discuss here? Or have you all found peace with the status quo?

Just to recap: The question is whether we should retain the Latin versions of certain terms or whether french.lbx should use the French versions of these. Examples being 'et al.' -> 'et collab.' A related question is about the technicalities of italics for Latin terms.

If these things are merely stylistic and both Latin and French terms are encountered in the wild, I would vote to retain the status quo.

[dbitouze]

@moewew IMHO, a nice solution would be to implement the @perstar suggestion. Meanwhile, the status quo is OK for me. If you want, I could ask other opinions on French (LaTeX) forums.

[moewew]

Mhhh, not sure if that can be implemented easily. The localisation system is quite involved. It seems to me that even though the Latin terms should be fairly universal, there are again subtle differences in usage (cf. #667). So ultimately the thing seems to be a stylistic question and I would like to avoid stylistic decisions if possible. The .lbxs are at an unfortunate intersection of translation and stylistic decisions. Implicitly they enforce stylistic choices, but we don't want to pick sides in general. In particular I don't want to start a 'war' between different stylistic factions.

Thank you for the offer. I'm not sure if a large discussion is really needed, if people had serious problems with how things are at the moment they would probably have complained already. I'd like to let sleeping dogs lie.

[cmfwyp]

Putting the Latin forms in italics would be an improvement over the status quo, but I recall there wasn't a clear way to do that. In other respects, the choice between Latin forms and French forms is stylistic.

[moewew]

@cmfwyp Thanks for the comment. I assume the italics are not stylistic and a must? In that case we could just have them right in the bibstrings in the .lbx. It's what Joseph does in his styles. In that case we might want to set \mkibid to do nothing by default for French.

[moewew]

Adding formatting commands to bibstrings is a bit tricky, so there is now #1028 with an attempt to work around this by defining "bibliography string classes" which allow for additional formatting. Comments are welcome!

[moewew]

After about nine months I decided to go ahead an merge https://github.com/plk/biblatex/pull/1028, so Latin phrases in the French translation that should be italicised can now be marked up as follows

\documentclass[british,french]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[style=authortitle-ibid, backend=biber]{biblatex}

\DefineBibliographyStrings{french}{
  andothers = {et\addabbrvspace al\adddot},
  ibidem    = {ibid\adddot},
}

\DefineBibliographyExtras{french}{%
  \DeclareBibstringSet{latin}{andothers,ibidem}%
  \DeclareBibstringSetFormat{latin}{\mkbibemph{#1}}}

\UndefineBibliographyExtras{french}{%
  \UndeclareBibstringSet{latin}}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
Lorem \autocite{sigfridsson}
ipsum \autocite{sigfridsson}
dolor \autocite{aksin}
\printbibliography

\selectlanguage{british}
Lorem \autocite{sigfridsson}
ipsum \autocite{sigfridsson}
dolor \autocite{aksin}
\printbibliography
\end{document}