After poking at this problem for a few weeks, I’m hoping that someone will be able to help.
The basic problem: The journal is bilingual (French and English). The default language is set at English, but they do frequently use the form emails to notify users in French.
However, when it comes to auto-reminders, they are only sent in English, rather than in the preferred language of the user. My best guess for why, is that the auto-reminder language is determined by the site default, rather than the user. Or is there something I’m missing that would allow them to keep the site as default English but have French and English auto-reminders, depending on the user’s language choice at registration?
Your assessment is correct – since automated reminders don’t get sent when the user is already interacting with the website, we can’t infer a language from their current session. In that case we use the journal’s default language.
We don’t keep track of the user’s last language, so making the system track that would take some work. The user’s profiles do have a list of working languages – though I suspect most users don’t fill these out – so one option would be to check that list, and when there are selections on the list but not the journal’s primary locale, to use another language.
However, one concern I’d have about adopting a policy like that is that journals will often spend time customizing email templates. They may not expect to have to do this in the complete mix of languages a user might be able to choose on their profile.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team