Changing another language "et al." to "et al."

Question

I am currently writing in Danish via the package:

\usepackage[danish]{babel}

Now, in my bibliography, which is done by biblatex, it changes the "et al.", when having a lot of authors, to "m. fl.", which is technically correct in Danish. But since "et al." is Latin, it pretty much is what we use in Denmark as well.

So basically, how do I change the "m. fl." to "et al." ?

Answer 1

The string displayed by biblatex if a name (author) list is truncated is internally called andothers, in English this string is "et al." (in the full as well as the abbreviated version), in Danish it happens to be "med flere"/"m.fl".

If you want to change andothers, the easiest way is to add the following lines to your preamble (it is a copy of english.lbx's andothers).

\DefineBibliographyStrings{danish}{%
  andothers = {et\addabbrvspace al\adddot}
}

Using this method, however, you can only define one string, this string is used regardless of the abbreviation setting.

---

If you care about the abbreviation setting (that is abbreviate=true or abbreviate=false), you will have to define your own modification of danish.lbx, let's call it danish-lat.lbx; put danish-lat.lbx somewhere LaTeX can find it. The file contains the following lines

\ProvidesFile{danish-lat.lbx}[2013/10/09 very few Latin phrases for Danish]
\InheritBibliographyExtras{danish}
\DeclareBibliographyStrings{%
  inherit   = {danish},
  andothers = {{et alii}{et\addabbrvspace al\adddot}},% controversial, what if all truncated authors are female?
  andmore   = {{et alia}{et\addabbrvspace al\adddot}},
}

This file tells biblatex to inherit all the options and strings defined in danish.lbx but modifies andothers and andmore. Here, the first pair of curly braces encloses the full (long string) while the second pair encloses the abbreviated string.

To use the latinised version of the Danish language add the following to your preamble.

\DeclareLanguageMapping{danish}{danish-lat}

This tells biblatex to load the latinised version of the Danish localisation whenever Danish localisation is needed.