[Tex/LaTex] biblatex: per-entry language switching

biblatexbibtexhyphenationlanguages

According to biblatex manual (p.24), the hyphenation field in a bib-entry switches language on per-entry basis:

hyphenation field
The language of the bibliography entry. The identifier must be a language name
known to the babel package. This information may be used to switch hyphenation
patterns and localize strings in the bibliography.

This functionality seemed to not work. I just used an example of bib base that comes with biblatex documentation to print the entire bibliography.

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[german,american]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=numeric,backend=biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

The bibliography contains few entries in German. However in the printed list of references they are formatted with english strings.

[8] Averroes. Drei Abhandlungen über die Conjunction des separaten Intellects
mit dem Menschen. Von Averroes (Vater und Sohn), aus dem
Arabischen übersetzt von Samuel Ibn Tibbon. Ed. and trans. by J. Hercz.
Berlin: S. Hermann, 1869.

Per-entry language switching is provided by the GOST bundle of bst style for BibTeX.
Looking through biblatex internal code, I've got an impression that biblatex needs major re-implementation in order to provide similar functionality. Or am I wrong?

Best Answer

Besides including hyphenation fields in your .bib file, you need to set the babel option of biblatex (presumably to autolang=other). See section 3.1.2.1 of the manual for details.

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