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Professional pedants (i.e. editors): what is the best treatment for conferences?

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NulliusInBlurba · 01/10/2013 10:32

I'm translating a book from German into English which contains a lot of detail on UN and UNESCO conferences and resolutions. We're using Chicago Manual of Style as a reference - in other words, American English - but I'm happy to be flexible if a better solution can be found. CMOS allows me to do this as long as I am consistent, of course.

The basic principle is that published monographs are cursive, articles within anthologies are in quote marks (and the name of the anthology itself in cursive).

CMOS recommends that descriptive conference titles (The Fourth Mumsnet Conference) simply be rendered in Roman/UC, but that 'fancy' ones ('AIBU? A Question for Our Times') should be accorded quote marks.

This gives me, for example:
World Conference on Arts Education: "Building Creative Capacities in the 21st Century"
Does that look acceptable to you?

So what do I do for UN/UNESCO resolutions and policy papers? They are published, but often primarily online as a PDF. Sometimes there seems very little distinction between a resolution itself and its written form - is it an idea/principle or a publication?

And what do I do about the following?

Road Map for Arts Education, 2006
Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, 2005
First Decade of Education for Africa (1997-2006)
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1990

My impulse is to write them merely as Roman, although some of them really are published documents too.

And is World Congress on the Implementation of the Recommendation Concerning the Status of the Artist regarded as a descriptive title in Roman or a fancy one in quote marks?

I'd appreciate any thoughts or ideas from fellow professionals.

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