You want to use inline quotes in a consistent and language-independent way.

Use the quote tag:

<para>This is an <quote>English quote</quote>.</para>

When people need quotes, they usually write "this". However, from a typographical point of view, this is wrong. There are special start and end quotation characters. The more elegant way is to use “this”.

However, the opening and closing characters are language-dependent. Many languages have different quotation rules. German readers prefer „this“, French « this », and the Italians use «this».

Using quote markers directly has one disadvantage: if your text contains different languages you need to know how quotes are displayed in the respective language. Moreover, it is easier and more consistent to leave this typographic detail to the DocBook stylesheets.

One nice thing with inserting quote is that it can be adapted to a different language by using the xml:lang attribute:

<para>This is a <quote xml:lang="de">German quote</quote>.</para>