Option to have article abstracts and titles in multiple languages

rcoughlan · August 31, 2017, 8:00pm

Hi
Qu from one of our eds: “We have some papers in one of our journals (CEEA proceedings) in French and I wonder if there is any way in OJS 3.0.2 to have an alternate title and abstract in English while keeping the French ones as well?”
Thanks
Rosarie

asmecher · August 31, 2017, 10:23pm

Hi @rcoughlan,

Currently content is only displayed in the user’s selected language (when available), falling back on the journal’s primary language when the current language doesn’t have a translation available. If you want to display several languages at once, you’d need to customize the templates. I’d suggest using a child theme to accomplish this. You’d need Smarty, CSS, and likely some PHP expertise.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

LucaAndreaLudovico · March 20, 2018, 3:41pm

Do you still have this problem? I solved a similar issue last night (after seeing your post) and - if you want - I can share the solution.
I am managing a journal on OJS whose main interface is in English. Papers are accepted either in English or in Italian (with a required translation of title and abstract); in the former case, only the English title/abstract have to appear, while in the latter I have to show both versions.
Here you can see what I mean: http://www.digitcult.it/index.php/dc/issue/view/6
And see also single-paper details…

Best.

Luca

rcoughlan · April 29, 2018, 5:29pm

Hi Luca,

yes, please ca you share the solution! That would be great.
Thanks
Rosarie

David_Alarcon_davidy · April 30, 2018, 3:36pm

@LucaAndreaLudovico… I’m also interested in knowing how he did it … thank you very much !!!

Paul_Valle · September 20, 2018, 10:44pm

Hi, i’m interesting in how you call the metadata in the abstract section, please share us the code!
Cya

strup · October 22, 2018, 8:14pm

Hi Luca, can you please share your solution for showing botha languages title and abstract. This is exactly what I need. Thank you very much, Strup

fgnievinski · October 13, 2021, 6:05am

Dear Luca, your bilingual theme is great! Could you make the code publicly available, please?

I think it could help fix the following issue:
Enable simultaneous display of multilingual metadata · Issue #7272 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub

Is anyone else aware of existing OJS themes showing titles and abstracts in multiple languages on the same page?

Thanks,
Felipe.

NateWr · October 13, 2021, 9:30am

I know that Cultural Anthropology does this as well:

https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/4468
https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/4443

One thing to note is that, as far as I can tell, neither of these journals modify the lang attribute when mixing languages. That means that a screen reader will try to read these as if they are English and probably fail to read the correct words.

If you are writing your own theme customization to solve this, use the lang attribute when showing text that doesn’t match the language of the page. Example:

<body lang="en-US">
  <h2>Abstract</h2>
  <p>My abstract in English.</p>
  <div lang="es-ES">
    <h2>Abstracto</h2>
    <p>Mi resumen en español.</p>
  </div>

Learn more about the lang attribute here: lang - HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN

fgnievinski · October 13, 2021, 2:19pm

That’s a good point, just making a mental note that the default language attribute is normally indicated in the top-most html tag, so that it’s inherited by all elements, unless otherwise specified:

<html lang="en-US">
<head>
<title>...</title>
<body>
<h2>Abstract</h2>
  <p>My abstract in English.</p>
  <div lang="es-ES">
    <h2>Abstracto</h2>
    <p>Mi resumen en español.</p>
  </div>

Another issue is metadata, I noticed that Luca managed to include both primary and secondary languages:

<meta name="DC.Language" scheme="ISO639-1" content="it"/>
<meta name="DC.Title" content=" Intervista con Catherine D’Ignazio: Data Feminism nella storia urbana e nel patrimonio"/>
<meta name="DC.Title.Alternative" xml:lang="en" content=" Interview with Catherine D’Ignazio:  Data Feminism for Cultural Heritage and Urban History"/>

My understanding is that, although Google Scholar specificially doesn’t support multilingual metadata in their own citation tags (see here), the more general Google Search would take in multilingual Dublin Core tags.

-Felipe.

luca.ludovico · November 1, 2021, 9:53am

Dear all, I posted my solution (with some comment) here:

github.com/pkp/pkp-lib

Enable simultaneous display of multilingual metadata

opened 06:09PM - 08 Sep 21 UTC

asmecher

Major Feature

**Describe the problem you would like to solve** From the Coalition Publica met…adata working group: > One of the most frequent issues with metadata is that users will enter more than one language into a single field because they want both to display. If users could selectively display more than one language for some metadata elements, we would certainly see a decrease in metadata abuse. Abstracts are an excellent example. It is very common to see two languages in a single abstract field because a journal wants to show both abstracts on an article landing page. For example, an English-language journal may have very little additional metadata or website copy available in French, but they want to provide French abstracts for English articles so that their Francophone readers can decide if they want to take the time reader an article in English. This example could be equally true for a French-language journal, or for other metadata fields such as title and keywords. **Describe the solution you'd like** Rather than displaying only the current language's metadata, with a fallback on the primary language, permit the display of metadata in both languages on the same page. This might need to be treated differently depending on the context. For example, it's common for an article landing page to present information in two languages at once (e.g. French and English) for titles and abstracts. For other fields (e.g. keywords) it might be better to introduce a visual indication that other languages may be available, with a way to toggle that display. **Who is asking for this feature?** Coalition Publica metadata working group **Additional information** From the recommenation: "Simultaneous Display of Multilingual Metadata"

Michal_Kokowski · October 12, 2023, 9:25am

Dear all,
When will this option be introduced to OJS?

Kind regards,
Michal Kokowski

Agariadne_Dwinggo_Sa · February 24, 2024, 6:43am

Thats great, but i have another problem in enter user metadata, why must double input? how to solve this? we need just input only english version user data. How to do that? please help

kerimsarigul · February 26, 2024, 11:12pm

In multilingual journals, one language is selected as the default language. For example, your journal is bilingual.
French and English
French: Default language
In this scenario, since the default language of the journal is French, metadata must also be entered in the default language.

If you set the default language of the Journal to English, you can enter metadata only in English.