How to clean-up metadata when a submission was created in the wrong language?(OJS 3.3)

Software Support
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Describe the issue or problem
I’m doing metadata cleanup on a multilingual journal. I have found some articles in which the metadata are written in the non-primary language, but were entered in the primary language fields. I know that this creates an accessibility problem (perhaps indexing/harvesting was well?). To be absolutely clear, I’m not talking about the galley language.

To clean up the metadata for these articles, I’m under the impression that the metadata should be in the non-primary language only (the metadata have not been translated).

OJS treats the fields in the submission language as required so we can’t just move the metadata from one language to the other without also changing the language. However, it doesn’t seem to be possible to change the submission language after the submission is finished.

Is it possible to change the submission language somehow (eg, through the database) to change which language fields are required in the metadata?

If not, is there another solution we should use to address the mismatch between the actual language in the metadata and the language fields in which it must be entered?

Steps I took leading up to the issue

  • Article in non-primary OJS language submitted and published in primary OJS language.
  • No option appears in Publication tabs to edit the submission language (using Journal Manager/Journal Editor roles).

What application are you using?
OJS 3.3.0-22

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Hi Tomasz @tmrozewski ! They haven’t gotten around to implementing the “submission language change” feature until OJS 3.5 (see Not possible to see or select publication language after submission · Issue #5502 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub, this topic is also related). With the database, you can try something like

update submissions set locale="en_US" where submission_id=1;

seems to work in my case, and can be pretty easily reverted if it doesn’t work.

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Hi all,

Just a heads-up that the language code for English changed from en_US in 3.3.0-x and older to en in 3.4.0-x and newer.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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@voffch thank you! I’ll test this out in my sandbox before implementing in production. If something goes grossly sideways, I’ll update the thread for the information of any future travelers who encounter it.

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