Enabling submissions in multiple languages without confusing authors and editors

Software Support
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1

We host several journals that accept manuscripts in multiple languages (as many as six languages per journal). My understanding of the advice in PKP Docs (https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/metadata-practices/en/journal-metadata#language-settings-for-the-journals-ojs-website) is that we should check the “submissions” box for all languages the journal will accept manuscripts in.

If we do this, then when authors are providing metadata for an article, fields to enter metadata in ALL of these languages show up. Even though it’s not mandatory to add metadata in all the languages, the fact that the fields appear confuses authors (and editors) and they often enter “English” or “Swedish” in the fields for Title, name, etc.

Is there a different way/place to indicate the language of a submission? Or a way to disable the metadata fields for all the languages being displayed?

I have seen a number of similar posts and questions on the Forum but haven’t seen any good solutions to ensure that the metadata is as correct as possible while not creating confusion for authors and editors.

We run OJS 3.3.0.13

multiple languages
multiple languages1477×700 67.2 KB

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If you do as follows, there will be no language options when entering article information during submission. I hope this is what you want.

multikang
multikang2036×1014 116 KB

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Thanks for your reply!

I should have specified that my question is about languages that a given journal accepts manuscripts in but in which they don’t want to offer the interface. So, for example, a journal may have the interface in English and Swedish but also accept manuscripts in Danish and Norwegian. What we would like to do in this case is to be able to select “Submissions” for Danish and Norwegian without this also affecting the forms and causing the extra fields in those languages to appear.

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