If you work in more than one language, especially with CJK sources, you have probably already encountered the limitations of Zotero's ‘normal’ multilingual support. For years, Juris-M was the answer: a Zotero fork that added powerful multilingual (and legal) features – but at the cost of a separate, increasingly outdated client.
With the new plugin cite-non-english (CNE) by Bo An, multilingual citations are finally available directly in ‘normal’ Zotero. I see CNE as the first realisation of what the Zotero team has been saying for a long time: multilingualism belongs in a plugin, not in a fork.
What Juris-M solved – and why it couldn't last
Juris-M was developed to do two things better than Zotero:
- Multilingual metadata: original title, transliteration, translations and language identification, especially for East Asian and other non-Latin scripts.
- Legal citation: jurisdiction-specific citation styles and a ‘Legal Resource Registry’.
A typical Juris-M workflow for CJK sources will be familiar to many:
- You save the title of a work in Chinese or Japanese, along with a romanisation and an English translation.
- You create a bibliography based on the same database in one language for an international journal and in another language for a local publication.
However, the problem was structural in nature: Juris-M is its own version of Zotero. Every major Zotero update (new PDF reader, note editor, annotations, new document types) had to be ported manually. As a result, Juris-M constantly lagged behind the core Zotero, and users increasingly got stuck on old versions. Many plugins then no longer worked.
Even in the Zotero forums the current recommendation is clear: for new projects, you should not expect Juris-M to continue to be actively maintained, but rather rely on plugins within Zotero from the outset.
Zotero's course: Extensions instead of forks
In several forum discussions, the Zotero developers have drawn a clear line:
- Maintaining a complete Zotero fork is practically no longer feasible; the project is developing too quickly and changing too many parts of the code.
- Advanced multilingual and legal behaviour belongs in plugins that dock onto Zotero's APIs and citation engine – not in a separate client.
- Work that brings Juris-M-like features back to Zotero as extensions is expressly welcomed.
Newer versions of Zotero also provide more connection points around the entry dialogue, additional fields and CSL integration. This allows plugins to influence which data is transferred to citeproc – without patching the Zotero core. cite-non-english makes use of precisely this opening.
The cite-non-english (CNE) plugin
The extension cite-non-english, zu finden unter https://github.com/boan-anbo/cite-non-english, would like to ‘add multilingual support for citations in Zotero’ now that Juris-M is no longer actively maintained. It installs like any other Zotero plugin and runs with the current version of Zotero – so you retain all the new features and gain significantly more powerful multilingual capabilities at the same time.
According to the author, CNE offers, among other things:
- Additional ‘non-English citation fields’ that allow local language, transliterated and translated forms of names and titles to be stored and controlled in a targeted manner.
- Specially prepared CSL styles (some of which are not 100% formally CSL-compliant) that contain additional configuration for the plugin.
- Intercepting the citation data that Zotero passes to citeproc-js, rewriting this data based on the style configuration, and then passing it to citeproc for formatting.
There's a lot of hacking going on under the bonnet: monkey patches, in CSL...<info>-block, serialised plugin configuration, etc. However, the formatted outputs are validated by an extensive test suite. The author also emphasises that he builds on existing functions from Zotero, CSL and citeproc-js as far as possible.
How CNE is changing multilingual workflows in Zotero
For multilingual users, the practical effect is considerable. The following video is reproduced from https://github.com/boan-anbo/cite-non-english.
One library, multiple writing systems
CNE is designed for workflows such as this:
- The author's name is stored in Romanised form in your library, e.g. “Hua, Linfu”, so that you can easily sort and search.
- In certain contexts, however, quotations should display the name in Chinese.
A forum post describes exactly this scenario: The Zotero entry has ‘Hua, Linfu’ as the author and the title in Pinyin. With CNE and a CNE-enabled style (e.g. a Chicago 18th ed. CNE variant), the plugin can still generate a correct multilingual citation with the desired non-English forms.
The key point is that CNE decouples your internal organisation (how you store names/titles in Zotero's standard fields) from how they appear in citations. You can continue to organise your library primarily using Romanisation and instruct the plugin to use the local script in the output.
Style-controlled multilingualism
Since CNE encodes a large part of its configuration in CSL style, the process is as follows: You select a CNE-enabled style (e.g. a Chicago style with ‘-cne’ in the name) and then:
- Reads special configuration data stored in the style.
- Rewrites the CSL JSON that Zotero would normally send to citeproc, inserting the appropriate non-English fields and variants.
- Citeproc formats the output as usual – but now with multilingual logic enabled.
From the user's perspective, this means:
- You select a CNE style in Zotero or Word just like any other citation style.
- You maintain the plugin fields (local script, transliteration, etc.) for each entry.
- Your quotations and bibliographies reflect the multilingual configuration encoded in the style.
The corresponding forum thread already contains feedback from practical experience, such as:
- Reports that certain fields (e.g.
cne-publisher originalfor books and book chapters) were not output as expected in early style versions, with specific examples from Chinese publishers. - Responses from the author, who addresses this feedback and adjusts the mapping of fields and styles accordingly.
This ongoing discussion shows that CNE is already being used in serious multilingual projects and is continuously being adapted to real-world style requirements.
And legal citations?
Juris-M has always combined multilingualism and legal citation, so it is worth taking a quick look at the current status:
- CNE focuses on multilingual citation, especially for non-English writings and CJK; a complete reproduction of the legal functionality of Juris-M is not the aim of the plugin.
- The Zotero team continues to maintain that legal citations should be included in plugins rather than forks – however, a fully developed legal plugin equivalent to Juris M is not yet in sight.
Those who primarily used Juris-M for its multilingual bibliographies will now find CNE to be the obvious starting point in the Zotero ecosystem. Those who rely on highly complex, multi-jurisdictional legal styles will have to continue working with a combination of Zotero and manual post-processing for the time being.
Should you switch from Juris-M to CNE?
If your main concern is multilingual citations of non-English sources – especially CJK – there are good reasons to switch now:
- You can work with the current version of Zotero (including the built-in PDF reader, annotations and the new note editor) and still enjoy a significantly improved multilingual output.
- You no longer need to maintain separate libraries or clients; CNE runs directly on your existing Zotero database.
- The plugin author actively encourages testing, bug reports and feature requests, and detailed feedback from the community can already be found in the forum thread.
A pragmatic approach could look like this:
- Install CNE in Zotero and test it first with some of your projects, especially those with many CJK sources.
- Try out CNE-enabled styles and see how well they meet the multilingual requirements of your target journals.
- Gradually standardise your workflow to Zotero + CNE if the results meet your requirements.
Caveats
The plugin is still in its infancy. As with Juris-M, much depends on a single person from the community, which entails a certain maintenance risk in the long term. In addition, the plugin requires special variants of citation styles: these must be adapted so that they actually use the newly introduced CSL variables. This means:
- CNE only generates correct output if you use a CNE-supported citation style.
- When a CSL style is updated (and our Chicago styles receive regular updates), these changes must be incorporated and ported into the corresponding CNE variant.
Summary
For most multilingual work that does not rely on highly specialised legal citation styles, CNE seems like the first realisation of a long-discussed goal: serious multilingual citation support as a plugin – directly in Zotero.
