One of the journals I’m affiliated with publishes in four languages: English, German, French and Spanish. We have four language locales installed. I am not the site administrator so I cannot check which locales are availble globally, but at some point in the history of OJS the locales seem to have changed so that insted of just “Français” I now have “Français (Canada)”, which is not right because I have French language submissions from other parts of the world, not from Canada; I would like just a general “Français”. The same is true for “Español (España)”: just “Español” would be better. As far as I can see, there is no problem with German, which is marked as “Deutsch”, with no indications if it is, e.g., Deutch from Germany or from Austria. Are the non-specified locales available?
Once the submission locale has been set and the paper submitted (I use Quick Submit plugin), it does not seem to be possible to change the locale without getting empty fields for abstract etc. Suppose I made a mistake in setting the submission locale? It should be possible to change it without affecting the other fields of the submission.
We include the country name when there is (or was, or is the clear potential for) two translations of the same language for different countries. You can change the list of languages by editing registry/locales.xml.
The submission language defines what language the required fields, e.g. titles and usually abstracts, are strictly required to be entered in. Changing this after submission may introduce blanks because the submission metadata was never entered in the new language; it’s a necessary side-effect of our language model, which overall meets a broad set of user expectations. Suggestions for refinement are always welcome.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
I understand the reasoning, but it does not seem to be necessary to mark the country explicitly in most cases. I mean, people do not care if the article is in French of France or in French of Canada, that’s an unnecessary detail for most readers, as they will be able to read both anyway. Especially if the differences between two language variants are not that big. It does create a problem, however, for international contributions. Could I change that by editing registry/locales? My suggestion for refinement would therefore be: let the admin decide whether to show the country after the language name.
Regarding the second point: it would be nice to be able to correct a mistake, if, for example, the one who entered data, has not chosen the right language.
This is unfortunately one of those extremely political elements that are impossible to implement in a way that’ll make everyone happy. The distinction between France French and Canadian French is very important to some, and others (e.g. zh_CN and zh_TW) even more so. I’d suggest tweaking registry/locales.xml to suit your wishes.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team