Gladhill Learning Commons FAQ: Citations

Names of persons, places, and organizations are romanized (transliterated). When it comes to the title of the work, MLA says that you can include the original characters or a transliteration of the title or both. But you should:

1) Be consistent

2) Include an English translation of the title in square brackets if your audience is unlikely to know the original language. Translations and transliterations of book titles are italicized and separated with a semi-colon.

Here's an example of a book citation from the OWL at Purdue:

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. Ра́ковый ко́рпус [Cancer Ward]. Dial Press. 1967.

Here's another example with the original characters, a transliteration, and a translation:

Mahfouz, Naguib. ثرثرة فوق النيل‎‎ [Thartharah fawqa al- Nīl; Adrift on the Nile].Egypt, Dar Shorouq, 1966.

For guidance on how to quote from sources in another language, see this article.

For more information, see:

The Owl at Purdue

Section 5.30 in the MLA Handbook. 9th ed., Modern Language Association of America, 2021.