How to create multilingual (English, Japanese) bibliographies with biblatex, biber and polyglossia

Question

I would like to update my bibtex file in a way that allows me to create multilingual bibliographies. Since I publish in English and Japanese, I will need this to work in a way that: In an English paper,

• Japanese entries in the Bibliography will have the names of authors both in Kanji and in Romanization; titles will also have to be duplicated in this way, but in addition I sometimes also translate the title, so there might be three entries.
• English citations will appear as usual.

In a Japanese paper

• The Japanese entries will be just author, title etc in Kanji, without additions.
• The English entries might have a translation of the title and give the Author in Japanese Katakana spelling.

To enable this, I thought of extending the bibtex entries in the following way

@collection{yanagida_zengaku_sosho_1975,
    Address = {京都},
        Adress_Romaji = {Kyōto}
    Editor = {柳田聖山},
        Editor_Romaji = {Yanagida Seizan}
    Publisher = {中文出版社},
    Publisher_Romaji = {Chūbun shuppansha},
    Title = {禪學叢書},
    Title_Romaji = {Zengaku sôsho},
        Title_en = {Collected Materials for the Study of Zen}
    Volumes = {10},
    Year = {1974-1977}}

I then hope that I will be able to pull the necessary pieces out of here and process them with biber and biblatex. How to go about that, I have no idea.

Answer 1

I've discussed this with the biblatex maintainer and we will probably aim for a style implementation of this with biblatex 3.x. With 1.7/0.9.6, the following will be possible. You will have to use the experimental biblatexml datasource format for such entries (you can still have all of your normal entries in bibtex format).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<bib:entries xmlns:bib="http://biblatex-biber.sourceforge.net/biblatexml">
  <bib:entry id="yanagida_zengaku_sosho_1975" entrytype="collection">
    <bib:editor>
      <bib:person gender="sm">柳田聖山</bib:person>
    </bib:editor>
    <bib:editor mode="romanised">
      <bib:person>
        <bib:first>
          <bib:namepart initial="Y">Yanagida</bib:namepart>
        </bib:first>
        <bib:last>Seizan</bib:last>
      </bib:person>
    </bib:editor>
    <bib:title>禪學叢書</bib:title>
    <bib:title mode="romanised">Chūbun shuppansha</bib:title>
    <bib:title mode="translated" xml:lang="en">Collected Materials for the Study of Zen</bib:title>
    <bib:location>京都</bib:location>
    <bib:location mode="romanised">Kyōto</bib:location>
    <bib:location mode="translated" xml:lang="en">Kyoto</bib:location>
    <bib:publisher>中文出版社</bib:publisher>
    <bib:publisher mode="romanised">Chūbun shuppansha</bib:publisher>
    <bib:date>
      <bib:start>1974</bib:start>
      <bib:end>1977</bib:end>
    </bib:date>
  </bib:entry>
</bib:entries>

There is no way to do this with bibtex format but this is no problem for biber - you can have many datasources of different formats. With the above example, you could choose to use the display format "romanised" and biber would construct the .bbl with only the romanised mode fields, for example. There will be no way to use mixed modes in the same entry however as this would need a radically enhanced .bbl format and massive internal biblatex changes which are planned for version 3.x

The above example uses the global displaymode setting (which will be in biblatex 1.7). You will also be able to set per-entry modes with an attribute on the entry, for example:

<bib:entry id="yanagida_zengaku_sosho_1975" entrytype="collection" mode="translated">

The default mode is "original" which matches fields with no mode specified too.

Edit on release of biber 0.9.6/biblatex 1.7: This is now implemented as mentioned. The default global setting is:

\DeclareDisplaymode{original,romanised,uniform,translated}

this biblatex macro is undocumented at the moment but you should be able to use it to change the global displaymode choice order. You can also set displaymode per-entry as shown above. Let me know on the biber SourceForge forum if you have problems.