Is it possible to translate the 'and' separator in references using BibTeX?

Question

I'm using the standard plain style for my bibliography. My document is written in Dutch, so I'm using the babel package, but the and separator before the last author isn't translated to the Dutch alternative en.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[dutch]{babel}
\begin{document}
  \nocite{*}
  \bibliographystyle{plain}
  \bibliography{references}
\end{document}

After reading this answer, I know how to create a custom style myplain, where and is changed to en, but I was wondering whether it is truly necessary to create a new style for this.

Aren't babel and some other trick sufficient? If not, does one have to create a new style for every language (e.g. in French, and is et)?

Answer 1

You can use babelbib:

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@article{ur,
  author={A. Uthor and W. Riter},
  title={Title},
  journal={Journal},
  year={2016},
}
@book{x,
  editor={E. Ditor},
  title={Collection},
  year={2016},
}
\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[dutch]{babel}
\usepackage{babelbib}

\begin{document}

\cite{ur}, \cite{x}

\bibliographystyle{babplain}
\bibliography{\jobname}
\end{document}

Answer 2

If you wish to modify the plain bibliography style file, I would actually recommend that you modify the plainnat style instead, for two reasons. First, compared with the plain style, plainnat is about 20 years younger and thus knows what to do with fields such as url, doi, eid, isbn, and issn. Second, when used with the natbib citation management package, it's trivially easy with plainnat to switch back and forth between numeric-style and authoryear-style citation call-outs, should the need to do so ever arise; in contrast, plain can only generate numeric-style citation call-outs.

Here's what you could do:

• Locate the file plainnat.bst in your TeX distribution. (If you have TeXLive 2015, you may find it at /usr/local/texlive/2015/texmf-dist/bibtex/bst/natbib/plainnat.bst.)

• Make a copy of the file, calling the copy, say, plainnat-nl.bst. Don't edit a file from the TeX distribution directly.

• Open plainnat-nl.bst in your favorite text editor -- the editor you use for your tex files will do fine -- and replace all three instances of " and " with " en ". (In my copy of the file, these instances occur on lines 232, 325, and 1111.)

• Save the file plainnat-nl.bst either in the directory that contains your main tex file or in a directory that's searched by BibTeX. If you choose the latter option, be sure to update the filename database of your TeX distribution suitably. (If you use TeXLive, try running sudo texhash.)

• Change the argument of \bibliographystyle to plainnat-nl, load the natbib package with the options square and numbers, and rerun LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice more to fully propagate all changes.

Happy BibTeXing!