Suppressing *some* language-specific changes in biblatex

Question

I need to suppress some language-specific adaptations babel and biblatex produce from my .bib-entries.

This is the relevant part of my header

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[
  style=authoryear-icomp,
  maxnames=2,
  backend=bibtex,
  safeinputenc,]{biblatex}

Now

@book(Platts, 
key={Platts},
author={John T. Platts},
title={A Grammar of the Urd\=u or Hind\=ust\=an\={\i} Language},
    publisher={Crosby Lockwood and Son}, 
address={London},
year={1920},
)

produces

Platts, John T. (1920): A Grammar of the Urdu or Hindustani Language. London: Crosby Lockwood und Son.

(macrons in the right place, no worries about that).

How do I prevent biblatex from changing "and" to "und" in the publisher field? I've tried the language and origlanguage fields, but they only work if babel=english is loaded, and when I do that, the whole bibliography style changes to English.

Answer 1

Quoting from section 2.3.4 of the biblatex manual (emphasis added):

The fields institution, organization, publisher, and location are literal lists in terms of § 2.2. This also applies to origlocation, origpublisher and to the field aliases address and school. All of these fields may contain a list of items separated by the keyword ‘and’. If they contain a literal ‘and’, it must be wrapped in braces.

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[
  style=authoryear-icomp,
  maxnames=2,
  backend=bibtex,
  safeinputenc,]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book(Platts, 
key={Platts},
author={John T. Platts},
title={A Grammar of the Urd\=u or Hind\=ust\=an\={\i} Language},
    publisher={Crosby Lockwood {and} Son}, 
address={London},
year={1920},
)
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\nocite{*}

\begin{document}

\printbibliography

\end{document}