Handling Chinese names when initials are shown?

Support
#1

I put this under support rather than a feature request because maybe there is some way to handle this?

My journal uses this format for articles that are in Asian languages (sample provided by journal):

Hua Linfu 華林甫. “Qingdai yilai Sanxia diqu shuihan zaihai de chubu yanjiu” 清代以來三峽地區水旱災害的初步硏究 [“A Preliminary Study of Floods and Droughts in the Three Gorges Region since the Qing Dynasty”]. Zhongguo shehui kexue 中國社會科學 1 (1999): 168–79.

However, if I enter a name like this:

Hua, Linfu 華林甫

my in-text citation ends up looking like this:

(L. 華林甫 Hua 1999)

As far as I can tell this is because Chicago uses initials when more than one author share the same surname. So, since that happens a lot with Chinese authors, I end up getting “L. Hua” instead of “Hua.” That’s OK, and I suppose one could alter that if the journal doesn’t want initials - but if that is correct, then how to suppress the Chinese name appearing in there along with the initials?

Citing Japanese Books/Papers in English - APA 6th Edition
#2

Suuuuper late reply, but it may still be relevant to some.

Put curly brackets around it. I noticed this in a Japanese source imported from Zotero.
So, with one of my sources, I just write {Hirano, Kouta 平野耕太} and it comes out just like that.

#3

That’s a dirty hack and I would not recommend to use it. Paperpile author format is “Lastname, Firstname Secondname”. Names formatted in this way can be parsed by Paperpile and subsequently the citation processing engine CSL. “{}” is a marker for names that should be taken as the are like “{Genome Sequencing Consortium}”, and no parsing will be attempted.

If you have a name like “Smith, Alex James” then the citation style can e.g. automatically shorten the name to “Smith, AJ”, while when you have “{Smith, Alex James}” it will always stay that way.

#4

But then how would you cite an Asian source?

I only use the curled brackets for my Japanese sources. If my citation is wrong in an academic paper, I risk failing.

#5

@andreas I would be interested in learning in how to cite an Asian source that does not require this workaround. What is the best way to handle this?