Let me start by clarifying that in my own scholarship, I rarely deal with foreign-language sources (hopefully this isn’t too shameful an admission). But at George Mason University, where I teach Doctoral Research Methods, we have lots of international students who bring their expertise in their native language into their research. This post summarizes the relevant bits of Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), 18th edition, for any scholars writing in English (using CMOS) but working with sources in other languages.

One major caveat for everything in this post is that this information is context-dependent. This post is geared toward people writing scholarship in music studies (music theory, musicology, ethnomusicology, and so on). I am a music professor working with music students; the rules would be quite different for scholarship in a foreign language literature publication, for example, where we can assume readers’ familiarity with other languages besides English.

I welcome any notes for improvement that anyone may have, especially those scholars that do regularly engage with sources in these languages.

Titles of works

Capitalization (CMOS 11.8)

All non-English titles are rendered in sentence case, rather than title case. So in English titles, we capitalize every word except the articles, prepositions, and conjunctions, and we call this “title case,” but it is actually an English-language quirk that doesn’t exist in other languages. If it’s not English, we don’t do that. Also beware that German has its own capitalization system that you don’t want to mess with.

Translations of titles of works (CMOS 11.11)

If you are using a foreign title, the translated title may follow. If you’re in-text, use parentheses to enclose the translation, but if you’re in the bibliography, use square brackets (as parentheses are used for other things, like page ranges).

But how do you format it within those parentheses/square brackets? It depends!

• If the translated title comes from a published translation of the entire work:
  • the translated title gets formatted like the original title (so, italics for books, quotation marks for articles, etc.)
  • the translated title is rendered in title case
• If the translated title is just your translation (the translation of the work is unpublished/nonexistent):
  • set the title in plain Roman text—no italics, no quotes
  • the translated title is rendered in sentence case

So official translation = official-looking formatting.

As for which to use, use the one that makes more sense for your audience. CMOS does allow that, as long as you make clear whether or not something has been published in English in the main text, it’s fine to use formatted English-language translated titles.

Translations of publisher names: don’t

CMOS 14.35 clarifies that the names of publishers should not be translated. Capitalization should be preserved as in the original language.

Translated quotations

Anytime you are translating something, it’s good scholarly practice to also include the original-language version of the quote somewhere nearby. A great option is to put the English translation inline, and put the original text in a footnote, as in this example:

Another option is to put the two texts side-by-side, but this is a little harder to do in a word processor—you may want to use a table or text boxes to achieve this.

Citing your translation (CMOS 11.15–16)

Always make clear where your translation comes from.

It’s best to use a published translation wherever possible, and where you do, to cite that translation following CMOS guidelines. If you’ve translated the quotations yourself, you can say that too. I often see authors simply say something like “translation mine”. If you used translation software or an AI tool, state that too: “translation generated by DeepL” would be adequate citation.

As for where to put these citations, you can either put them in parentheticals after your quoted material, or you can make a blanket statement about the source of all translations at the beginning of the work (for example, “Unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own.”)

Special considerations for sources in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean

Transliteration or Romanization (CMOS 11.78–82, 11.87, 11.98)

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are all languages that use an entirely different character set than English. (There are other such languages too, like Greek or Russian, but this post focuses on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean just because those are the languages my students use more). Because English speakers are usually totally unfamiliar with how to pronounce or read these other character systems, these languages are often Romanized—rendered in the Latin alphabet—for English-language publications. Each language has standard ways of Romanizing their writing system, such as pinyin for Chinese. CMOS has information on each of these systems, as well.

There is no equivalent to uppercase or italics in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, but when these languages are transliterated, italics and capitalization are added to follow the norms set out elsewhere in CMOS: for titles, use sentence case (not title case, because they are foreign-language titles), and if it’s a large work, italics. Proper nouns are also typically capitalized in titles and elsewhere.

Including Chinese, Japanese, and/or Korean characters (CMOS 11.99)

Providing Chinese, Japanese, or Korean characters in your English-language scholarship is optional, so if all this seems too complex, you may choose not to include them and save yourself some trouble.

However, many people choose to include characters alongside transliterations, because they’re quite useful. Transliterations of non-Latin alphabets are used for the convenience of readers who don’t know those writing systems, but inherent in all transliterations is the possibility of different people transliterating differently. And of course, those who can read the original writing system will prefer that system. For this reason, it’s a good idea to include the original characters of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean alongside the transliterations that CMOS requires. I’ll focus in my examples on Chinese, but the same concepts apply to all three writing systems, and CMOS provides examples of all.

Providing characters in-text, e.g., for a term, is pretty simple: after the transliterated term, provide the characters. In the example below, notice:

• the characters are always presented without additional quotation marks or italics
• the translated terms are in parentheses and also without additional quotation marks or italics.

Providing characters for a bibliography entry or citation gets a little more hairy, especially when you also want to include English translations, but there is an underlying logic. In the citation below, notice the following features:

1. For an author: first provide the transliterated name, then characters.
2. For a title of a smaller work (article, book chapter): first provide the transliterated title in quotation marks, then the characters, then the translated title in square brackets. All use sentence case (unless the translation is published, in which case the English title is set in title case).
3. For the title of a larger work (book, journal): first provide the transliterated title in italics, then the characters, then the translated title in square brackets and Roman (non-italic) type. Note that journal names need not be translated.

Once again, it may be nice to know that including these characters is totally optional according to CMOS. There are scholarly benefits but it does open up a can of worms formatting-wise.

Conclusion

I’ve done my best here to summarize a lot of different parts of CMOS into easily digestible language. For complete details on these matters, you’ll need to look at CMOS yourself. If you’re affiliated with an institution, you’ll have access through your library. I probably made mistakes. I don’t read Chinese and I rarely work with sources in any foreign language at all. If you notice something that could be fixed, please get in touch (you can find my email on my faculty bio).