I am using XeLaTeX and BibLateX to write papers in the humanities. I routinely use transcriptions of Chinese (pinyin), Korean (McCune-Reischauer), Japanese (Hepburn), Manchu (Norman) etc. In addition, there are occasional references and quotes in European languages that use diacritics, such as French.
Up until now, I've written all my Chinese transcriptions in pinyin with tone marks (´ acute and ` grave accents, ˇ háček, and ¯ macron). However, many journals discourage the use of tone marks in the transcriptions. I'm therefore looking for a way to strip my text of the diacritics for Chinese. As I see it, I face two problems:
I want to strip the bibliography-references of the pinyin diacritics without having to reenter them in the .bib file again, and
I want to remove only the diacritics in the Chinese transcriptions, not the macrons in Japanese (e.g. Tōkyō), or the typographically identical accents in French (e.g. problème).
Is there a way to do this?
UPDATE:
This is my try with the code kindly provided by PLK below. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me:
\documentclass[utf8,12pt,letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage[fallback]{xeCJK}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\defaultfontfeatures{Ligatures=TeX}
\setmainfont{Linux Libertine O}
\newcommand{\mainfontCJK}[0]{HanaMinA}
\setCJKmainfont[Scale=0.9]{\mainfontCJK}
\setCJKfallbackfamilyfont{\CJKrmdefault}[Scale=0.9]{NanumMyeongjo}
\XeTeXlinebreaklocale "zh"
\XeTeXlinebreakskip = 0pt plus 1pt
\usepackage[notes,strict,isbn=false,backend=biber,bibencoding=utf8,hyperref=true]{biblatex-chicago}
\DeclareSourcemap{
\maps[datatype=bibtex]{
\map{
\step[fieldsource=author, match=\regexp{[\x{300}\x{301}\x{304}\x{30c}]}, replace={}]
}
}
}
\DeclareNosort{
\nosort{type_names}{\regexp{[\x{300}\x{301}\x{304}\x{30c}]}}
}
\DeclareNoinit{
\noinit{\regexp{[\x{300}\x{301}\x{304}\x{30c}]}}
}
\addbibresource{MY BIBLIOGRAPHY HERE}
\begin{document}
\cite{WeiYuan18422004ShengwuJi}
\printbibliography
\end{document}
The citation comes out as usual, with the diacritics (please ignore the strange formatting of a name, I usually use something else to fix that, which I haven't included in this minimal example):
UPDATE
The bibliography entry used in the example above:
@book{WeiYuan18422004ShengwuJi,
author = {Wèi, 魏源, Yuán},
title = {Shèngwǔjì},
titleaddon = {圣武记},
usere = {Record of the sacred wars},
publisher = {Yuèlù shūshè},
date = {2004},
origdate = {1842},
address = {Chángshā},
edition = {\autocap{c}ritical edition},
maintitle = {Wèi Yuán quánjí},
volume = {3}
}
{\^o}
in your bibliography anyway, perhaps the simplest would be to (re)define those accents to just give their arguments. No need to mangle the bibliography that way. For the text itself, I'd create a script for sed (if on a Unixy system) to replace the UTF-8 accented characters. Doing the replacement only for Chinese transliterations is extremely hard, unless marked by something like\foreignlanguage{chinese}{transliteration here}
. In the later case it is only tricky.