On Wed, 30 Aug 2006 22:11:47 +0200, Nicolas François <nicolas.francois(a)centraliens.net&gt; wrote: Getting a quick look at it. At first sight, this is nice. This is OK. This, I'm afraid, is not. iirc, the '#' in bibtex is strings concatenation... Yes. Actually, most of the fields should not be translated either because these are title/names/numbers/... or because bibtex itself (via its style files) should take care of it. Typically, fields like: author = {Jean-Yves Marion and Jean-Yves Moyen} should usually not be translated (the 'and' is a keyword of bibtex) because authors names are usually the same in all languages. Of course, there is the problem of different writing system (eg japanese names could be written in japanese for a japanese version but transliterated in roman for an english/french/... version) and of elder authors (eg the english 'Euclid' should be translated into 'Euclide' in a french version). Similar remarks hold for title of the papers (those should not be translated, except for transliteration), editors names, ... fields like year = 2006 should probably not be translated (well, maybe if translated into a language with a completely different dating system ?) and some stuff is taken into account by the .bst (bibtex style file). Typically, months names are expanded by bibtex itself (that is "month = apr" will result in the month 'April' being displayed) and I have a french bst that expand months names into french (eg "month = apr" into 'Avril'). Well, having everything translatable is probably not that harmfull, but the point is... on my own .bib file, there are very few differences between my french and english versions. Only a couple of notes are changed and maybe one or two town/country names. Attached is what my complete biblio more or less look like. It was prepared fro translation using the LaTeX gettext module that was shortly included into latex-makefile, that means that the only things I felt I need translating (between english and french) are those into \gettext command. The rest must either stay the same or is taken into account by the .bst The point is that the translated file has then to be generated even with a very very low rate of actually translated strings (if all fields are copied into the .po) which is certainly possible but not very convenient (and keeping a huge .po for only a couple translated strings is a huge waste of resources). By the way (note to Martin), that latexgettext was quite nice for these two kind of situations met in .bib: _ very very few things to translate compared to things not to translate, so it is easier to specify manually what has to be translated rather than try to guess. _ translation of command. Typically, I liked a \bibalpha command that triggered either \bibliographystyle{alpha} or \bibliographystyle{fr-alpha} depending on the current language of the document. This, I guess, is a more general problem (it is probably also present with translation of LaTeX files). -- Hypocorischtroumpf, Jym.