some title case issues

[anya]

I'm having several title case problems that I hope I can get some advice on.

2. I have a bunch of titles in Chinese characters. If the texts came with their own English titles, I write:
ChineseChinese. EnglishEnglish.
But if I am giving my own translation, I include parentheses:
ChineseChinese. (EnglishEnglish.)

That way a reader who wants to find the text knows whether they can look for the English title or if it's just my own translation. If the first word of my translated title, in the parentheses, is something that would capitalized in Title Case, everything is fine. But if it's "A" "An" or "The," it won't capitalize because the parenthesis leaves an extra space between the period (.) and the beginning of the English title. So I get something like
ChineseChinese. (an English Title.)

I tried putting "A" "An" and "The" in the "Don't Change Case" list under Preferences, but it seems to make no difference.

In general, I'd like to add my vote to those who have suggested having a marker that would make BE ignore capitalization for a particular title (or even particular words in a particular title -- as opposed to a global "ignore capitalization"). For those of us working with foreign-language texts this would be very helpful.

3. In Title Case, a time period like "the 1930s" shows up as "the 1930S". It's not a big deal but it looks a little silly. Any way to lower that case?

and...resolved...
1. UPDATE: I have resolved this problem by erasing then re-entering the words "a, an, the" in Preferences > Don't Change Case. I have no idea why this should work but it seems to be working.

All my reference types are set to output Title Case. But I'm getting a lot of weird things like this:

Arrigo, Linda Gail. 1996. The economics of Inequality in an agrarian Society: Landownership, Land Tenure, Population Processes and the rate of Rent in 1930'S China.

Surely with title case this should be "The Economics of Inequality in an Agrarian Society..." I don't know what to do with the lower-case "e" of economics and "a" of agrarian.

Thanks for your help on any of these.

[Jon]

1. I don't know why they aren't capitalized, unless "economics" and "agrarian" are in the list of words to exclude (unlikely). I'd rebuild the database on general principle. If it persists, you export that single reference to a Bookends file and send it to me.

2. Right. Bookends looks for a preceding period and space, and the parenthesis throws it off. I'll take a look and see if there's anything I can do.

3. I see the problem with 1930S. I'll look into that, too.

Jon
Sonny Software

[anya]

Hi Jon, thanks for that quick reply.

I ended up resolving 1 as I note above; it seemed like the presence of articles (a/an/the) was affecting the capitalization of the word following the article. I thought I'd let you know for future reference.

For 2, one fix might be to add ( and " as possible additions to what Bookends looks for, in addition to a space; but I don't know how simple that is.

Thanks for looking into 2 + 3.
anya

[Jon]

Hi,

I've fixed #3 (1930s).

I can't reproduce the problem with "agrarian". You'll need to send me that reference so I can see what's going on.

Jon
Sonny Software