Q. Our group has chosen The Chicago Manual of Style as a reference for our university translation project (textbook on international trade). What I’d like to know is whether, since we have chosen CMoS, it now supersedes the capitalization rules used by the publishing agencies of works cited in the text. For example, would it be “Customs—Trade Partnership Against Terrorism” as it appears on their website or “Customs—Trade Partnership against Terrorism,” following CMoS rules for lowercasing prepositions?
A. The latter. Choosing a style guide means that you will edit your documents to conform to that guide. It’s actually one of the primary purposes of having a guide. Titles in original published works feature various display styles—all caps, small caps, italics. There’s really no way a writer or editor can be expected to research and reproduce the exact appearance of the title page of every book. Since you’ve decided to follow CMOS (yay!), you will lowercase “against” per CMOS 8.159.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. How do I acknowledge that a quotation is a translation made by myself? (I’m writing in Dutch; all sources
are in English.)
Q. At one time, the location of a publisher could be used to get a phone number via directory assistance. This is no longer
how anyone would do it, and publishers have frequently moved, been acquired, and so forth, so the location is often highly
ambiguous. Authors spend tens of thousands of hours annually looking up or making up publisher locations. I’m
staring now at a copy editor’s request that I identify the location of Cambridge University Press—and
the editor says it is because you insist on it. Can you give me any sane reason for this collective expenditure of effort
and print in 2012? It would make me feel better, as it feels like an empty ritual of no contemporary value, engaged in by
a field that is unaware of the digital era. Insistence on archaic rules brings to mind the replicant lament in Blade Runner, “Then we’re stupid and we’ll die.”
A. We are so misunderstood! CMOS is not in the business of insisting on this or that. From our very first edition in 1906 we have stated very clearly that
“rules and regulations such as these, in the nature of the case, cannot be endowed with the fixity of
rock-ribbed law. They are meant for the average case, and must be applied with a certain degree of elasticity.”
As for place of publication, in scholarly research it can be useful in tracking the development of the literature within a
discipline (especially in instances where publishers are old and obscure). In fact, it’s not unusual
for an academic to write a bibliography that includes only the place of publication for each work cited, without the publisher.
When that happens, the editor or publisher must decide whether to require more information.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. How do you recover from a real proofreading blooper—the kind that has everyone in gales and is terribly
embarrassing?
A. Naturally, we have very little experience with this. Is there absolutely no way to blame it on someone else? If not, you
probably should keep a low profile until it blows over. Lucky for you, proofreaders automatically have a fairly low profile.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I want to cite a newspaper article contained within a microfilm edition that has been scanned into a PDF and is available
online at a (US) state archive. I am inclined to cite it as a newspaper article and include the online database tag at the
end of the citation, ignoring the microfilm finding aids that still define the PDF of the page (reel no., image no., etc.).
Is my inclination correct? And if not, how would I go about citing this article?
A. Your plan is a good one. You can always annotate a citation, if you like, in a note or bibliography. Just add a line with
whatever extra information you think is helpful.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Sometimes a journal is not published during its cover year, and sometimes there is a considerable gap between the cover date
and the actual publication, and it is important to include both dates—the cover date so that the article
can be found, and the publication date so that its up-to-dateness upon publication can be assessed. Should the date be given
as 1989 [1992], or as 1992 [1989]?
A. Journal users typically are aware of the time lag, but if it’s important to note it, simply annotate
the citation. The formulation you suggest might confuse the matter, since it is normally used in citations to indicate date
of original publication and date of reprinting.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Should a Russian journal title appearing in an English-language bibliography be Latinized? Or should both the Russian and
transliterated versions of the journal’s title be listed? Is it correct to transliterate names of journals?
A. This is a matter of editorial judgment rather than correctness. Factors in making the decision include whether your expected
readers are able to read untransliterated Russian, whether special characters can be produced (or typeset), whether the preparer
knows how to transliterate correctly, and whether the publisher (if the document is going to be published) has a policy about
transliteration.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Dear Chicago, what verb tense do you recommend for the literature review section of a scholarly article? APA insists on the
past tense, arguing that any work included in a literature review was obviously published in the past. People writing about
English literature, on the other hand, discuss works in the present tense because readers always experience the book in the
present. I’m editing a Canadian public policy journal, and the author uses the present tense to discuss
works published ten or fifteen years ago. Should I change these tenses to the present perfect? The journal has no in-house
rule on this.
A. Since the use of the present tense in literature reviews is widely accepted, and since any decision about where to cut off
“past” from “present” literature would
have to be arbitrary, using the present tense for everything is a fine option. You shouldn’t worry about
using it if a journal doesn’t express a preference.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Hi, there! In a bibliography or reference list, Chicago recommends inverting only the first author’s
name and not subsequent author names. What’s the reason for this? Why not invert all author names? I
trust in Chicago’s expertise, but I would like to know why, because I often have to defend my copyediting
decisions.
A. Because it’s so darned hard to read names backward. You might rather ask the opposite question: why
on earth would anyone reverse the names? The first author’s name is reversed to facilitate alphabetizing,
but there’s no reason to tangle up the rest.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. How should one style the titles of blogs? Should they be headline capitalized? In quotation marks? Italicized? Some combination of these? Thank you.
A. Chicago uses italic type. Here’s an example (where “Blog” happens to be part of the title):
In a comment posted to The Becker-Posner Blog on March 6, 2006, Peter Pearson noted . . .
You can find examples of Chicago citation styles in our Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]