Changing the primary language?

Does anybody have experience with changing the primary language of an multi-journal, multi-language installation?

UGP is working with OJS since 2014, on 3.1.1-4 now.
testing for upgrade to 3.2.0-3.

When we started we had mainly Dutch journals, so the primary language is Dutch. But we have more and more English- and German- only journals. When testing version 3.2.0-3 we encountered problems with some journals, where we were not able to see metadata in multiple languages.

So we are thinking about changing the primary language to English.
Any experience? Good/bad idea?
Any tips?

Hi @ugp2,

Rather than changing the site’s primary language from Dutch to English – which will probably cause you headaches with the system expecting data to be present in English when it is not – I’d suggest working on each journal’s settings, particularly if only some had problems. Can you describe the issues you had with those?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi Alec,

We did see that the primary language is in 2 places. It seems that the Default locale in the config.inc.php is set to en_US and in the application under languages the primary local is set to Dutch. Which one is leading? And should these 2 be identical?

We can’t send a good example because the test environment isn’t working anymore. The main problem was that the title and abstract were not visible in all languages.

Regards,

Hi @ugp2,

With apologies for the slow response –

The config.inc.php setting only provides a default on installation; after that the web-based site-wide takes precedence.

For elements that are journal-specific, the journal-based setting then takes precedence. That’s for abstracts, titles, etc., but notably not for user given and family names, since the user pool is shared across all journals in the same installation.

I’d suggest double-checking the journal’s setup. If you can describe that to me, and the problem you’re encountering, I can help debug from there. But just a heads-up – changing the site’s primary locale probably isn’t going to fix it. Submission titles and abstracts are affected by the journal’s configuration much more than the site’s.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team