Q. Should national anthems—for example, La Marseillaise—be set in quotes?
A. A national anthem is a song by any other name, but with more pomp and circumstance. So whether it’s “La Marseillaise” or “O Canada”—or “March of the Volunteers,” a song written in 1934 and later adapted as the anthem of the People’s Republic of China—put it in quotation marks.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. For a book title within a book title in a language other than English, should quotation marks be inserted around the title within the title, just as we would for English-language titles (per CMOS 8.173)?
A. Usually, yes. For example, the French translation of Alice Kaplan’s Looking for “The Stranger” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), like the English original, presents the title of Camus’s famous book in italics on its cover:
En quête de L’Étranger
To mention or cite this title in Chicago style, you would put the whole title in italics and add quotation marks (as for the English-language version), as in the following example of a bibliography entry (which retains the alternative French style for capitalizing titles as discussed in CMOS 11.27):
Kaplan, Alice. En quête de “L’Étranger.” Translated by Patrick Hersant. Paris: Gallimard, 2016.
Books in French or Spanish may use guillemets (« ») instead of italics for a title within a title; books in German may use reverse guillemets (» «) or inverted quotation marks („ “); other languages may follow similar conventions. You can convert such marks to English-style quotation marks (per CMOS 11.7). But if the title within a title isn’t differentiated as such on the cover (or title page) in any discernible way, and unless you are familiar with the conventions of the original language, it may be best to reproduce the title without adding quotation marks.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I’m editing a biography (in English) of a French historical figure that contains many French-language titles of works, including plays, books, poems, and artwork. I’m applying Chicago’s rule of sentence-case capitalization to these titles (for example, La dame aux camélias). But what about a title like Les Misérables? Should that actually be written Les misérables? That doesn’t seem right.
A. If you were to use sentence case for French titles of works, then yes—you would write Les misérables, because “misérables” is not a proper noun. But French usage varies. You’ll see sentence-style capitalization in some of the product descriptions at Amazon.fr for Victor Hugo’s novel (and its adaptations in other media); more often you’ll see what looks like headline style. But as a longer title would show, that isn’t headline style; it’s the Académie française–approved style that capitalizes the definite article and the first substantive (and any intervening adjective or adverb). That’s the style you’ll see on many French book covers and title pages (and according to which your other example would be styled La Dame aux camélias). CMOS mentions this style as an alternative in paragraph 11.27. We recommend sentence style first because it’s easy to apply and applicable across many languages. But you can make an exception and follow the more common French practice, especially in a work with a French theme (and assuming you are familiar enough with French to apply the rule correctly). For a fuller statement of the rule (in French), see the discussion of capital letters in titles of works (“majuscules dans les titres d’œuvres”) under “Questions de langue” at the website of the Académie française (where Les Misérables is used as an example).
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Not actually a question but a comment on one of your recent answers, regarding type style for book titles on social media platforms. You left out a common and I think preferable option: to use leading and trailing underscores (e.g., _A Tale of Two Cities_). Some software (such as Slack and WhatsApp) already converts text with that form to italics, and readers will so understand it even on platforms (such as Facebook) that do not yet do so.
A. In our original answer, we were considering the problem of presenting book titles in a stylistically appropriate way on platforms that do not allow for italics. Literal underscores would be _overkill_ for most types of posts. Readers don’t usually need to know that, for example, Chicago recommends italics where this option is available. But you are right: where it is important to communicate italics as such, underscores (known in Unicode as low lines) would be the preferred approach (just as *asterisks* would be the preferred delimiters for boldface).
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. On social media platforms, where italics are not an option, what do we do with book titles or other titles that would normally be italicized?
A. You have three choices: (1) Let the capital letters speak for themselves: Main Title: Subtitle. (2) Use quotation marks: “Main Title: Subtitle.” (3) Use all caps: MAIN TITLE: SUBTITLE. The first option is the cleanest but doesn’t do a good job especially with one-word titles; the second and third options will delimit the title more definitively. The third option, favored by some publishers (like @RandomHouse), is a convention that dates to the era of typewritten editorial memos (try underscoring titles on a manual typewriter all day long). Quotation marks are maybe the most sensible option, but there’s no settled convention. Choose your favorite and stick with it.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Hello! I work as a proofreader in retail, and we often use “on sale” in headlines. I’m not sure if “on” is acting as a preposition or an adverb, therefore I’m not sure if it should be capitalized in a headline like this: “Now on Sale.” Thank you!
A. In “on sale,” on is a preposition and sale is its object. The expression itself is a phrasal adjective. Your headline is shorthand for “This Item Is Now on Sale” (or “These Items Are Now on Sale”)—in which the phrase “on Sale” modifies the understood item (or items). Chicago’s exceptions to its rules for headline-style capitalization do not extend to the use of prepositions in phrasal adjectives (except in common Latin phrases like “de facto”). So to follow Chicago style, write “Now on Sale.” See CMOS 8.159.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. CMOS 11.9 states, “When the title of a work in another language is mentioned in text, an English gloss may follow in parentheses,” and “if the translation has not been published, the English should be capitalized sentence-style . . . and should appear neither in italics nor within quotation marks.” In texts that discuss in detail such a work (say, a literary analysis of a Chinese-language novel for a predominantly English-speaking readership) and where the English gloss is justifiably preferred to the original, should that gloss stay in roman, capitalized sentence-style throughout, or may it carry the features of a published translation (italics or quote marks) for ease of presentation?
A. Yes, in a case like that it makes sense to use italics (or whatever) for the title. You might introduce the style explicitly to ward off the copyeditor—for example: “In the Chinese novel [Chinese characters or transliteration] (hereafter referred to as Plum Tree at Sunset) . . .”
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Do you capitalize the preposition for in headline-capitalization style in this case: “XYZ: what is it good for?” Lowercase or uppercase? Thanks a lot!
A. The last word is capitalized in a Chicago-style headline-capped title, regardless of syntax: “XYZ: What Is It Good For?” Please see CMOS 8.159 (point 1) for this rule.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Dear CMOS, would you please clarify 8.191 in the following example? I understand that Wikipedia should be roman, because it was never available in print. I also understand that The Chicago Manual of Style Online should be in italics, because there are both print and online editions. However, in practice, I find myself with sentences like this, which look “wrong”: “Comparing Music Index and RILM Abstracts with Music Periodical Index for music education topics is challenging.” In this example, which is coming up a lot in a book chapter I’m writing, would you italicize all three? And then, for consistency, would you italicize all three even when they are not together?
A. When similar online references are grouped together like that, it’s a service to readers to treat them all the same. Normally that would mean using roman type, since the majority of websites have no printed counterpart, but if most of the website titles in your book are italic, you could go with that.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Should published reports be italicized or in quotation marks?