Ridiculously niche problem, but maybe it’ll help just to describe it here.
I’m working on a book that cites lots of French, Italian and German material as well as English. I’ve been briefed to anglicise the city names in the bibliography (Milan rather than Milano, etc.), but nothing was specifically said about what to do with terms like ‘a cura di’ or ‘éd.’ or ‘herausgeber’.
Time is tight and the bibliography is really messy in lots of ways, so I’m reluctant to open a discussion about this point with the author.
I initially decided to anglicise terms like the above to ‘edited’, and ‘traduit’ to ‘trans.’ and so forth, just to keep the bibliography simple and usable. If I hadn’t done that, I would have had to standardise them all in some other way - there was just so much variation that it was a real jumble of presentation styles even within a given language - and I am not multilingual, so I would have been guessing at a system. I justified the decision to myself on the basis that it was in keeping with the request in my brief to anglicise all the city names.
Doubting myself now though, halfway through. It’s a 100-page biblio so there are lots of changes! The more I do, the more conscious I am that I may be ironing out shades of meaning - for instance, I’m not really sure that ‘a cura di’ = ‘edited by’ in every case. I half think it’s close enough and there are limits to what one underpaid editor can do in a short time; but then I have visions of the author being furious at my changes.
If anyone has done this before I’d welcome opinions.