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Instead of showing the French word dans, BibLaTeX is putting in to introduce booktitles and journals. For example

@incollection{rodgers99,
    Address = {London},
    Author = {Roders, C.},
    Booktitle = {Modern France: Society in transition},
    Date-Added = {2013-03-30 21:06:06 +0000},
    Date-Modified = {2013-03-30 23:09:27 +0000},
    Editor = {Cook, M. and Davie, G.},
    Pages = {53-72},
    Publisher = {Routledge},
    Title = {Gender},
    Year = {1999}}

comes out as

Sellier, G. (2002). « Construction des identités de sexe dans les séries policières françaises. » In : Les séries policières. Sous la dir. de G. Sellier et P. Beylot. Paris : L’Harmattan, p. 259–271.

as opposed to

Sellier, G. (2002). « Construction des identités de sexe dans les séries policières françaises. » Dans : Les séries policières. Sous la dir. de G. Sellier et P. Beylot. Paris : L’Harmattan, p. 259–271.

Obviously, I've included babel and everything (hence most of it is translated), so I can only assume this is a bug?

I've only just started using LaTeX, can I just edit the french.lbx file in the biblatex package or is that a bad idea?

Paul Gaborit
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jaimepapier
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    Welcome to TeX.sx! It's always a bad idea to edit package files in the installation path. If you want to provide your own package file you should do this in your local texmf tree or in your working directory. – Marco Daniel Mar 31 '13 at 10:55
  • Okay, I'll do that if this hasn't been fixed by the time I come to hand this in. Thanks very much. – jaimepapier Mar 31 '13 at 11:02
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    You can also do some changes in your tex file. See http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/50102/redefining-cited-on-string-and-others-in-biblatex/50104#50104 – Marco Daniel Mar 31 '13 at 11:14
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    Just tell me what it should ideally be and I'll correct it in biblatex for the next release. There are all sorts of missing translation parts - if you can contribute changes to french.lbx, I'd be glad. – PLK Mar 31 '13 at 13:58
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    But “in” is commonly employed, particularly in the Humanities: it's the Latin word, not an anglicism. Undoubtedly this is why it hasn't been “translated”: there's no need. Much more debatable, in my opinion, are the colon that follows “in” and the period that separates from what precedes it, whereas, traditionally, a comma is used. – Bernard Mar 31 '13 at 12:55
  • Just to answer the last bit of the question: You should not edit the french.lbx from the biblatex installation of your TeX system. If you manually change a file installed by your system these changes can be overwritten by updates or re-installs. – moewe Aug 06 '20 at 12:14

1 Answers1

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Apparently there is not comment agreement on whether such strings should be latin or french, see for example the discussion on the biblatex github https://github.com/plk/biblatex/pull/1022 (thanks to Moewe for pointing this out).

Should you wish to override the current default latin with a french equivalent you can do that in your document using \DefineBibliographyStrings:

enter image description here

\documentclass[french]{article}

\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{biblatex}
\DefineBibliographyStrings{french}{in={dans},inseries={dans}}
\addbibresource{ref.bib}


\begin{document}
\cite{test}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

where ref.bib contains

@Article{test,
  author =   {Author, A. N.},
  title =    {Title},
  journal =  {Jour.},
  year =     2011
}
Andrew Swann
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  • If translations are incorrect, that should be reported at https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues. In this case the situation doesn't seem to be as clear cut as it appears to be at first, see for example the discussion in https://github.com/plk/biblatex/pull/1022. – moewe Aug 06 '20 at 12:10
  • @moewe Many thanks for this. I have rephrased the beginning of the answer. – Andrew Swann Aug 07 '20 at 08:25