Use of metadata for other languages

Feature Requests
1

Hi there,

I have a question about a file’s metadata: We have some journals which are published in two or more languages, so we have to write the metadata for each and every one of them separately. It would be more convenient if we could write it one time and then copy it for the other languages. Is there a way to include this function?

Edit: It would also be great, if we could upload a cover for all languages (or selectable languages) in one step.

Kind regards
Daniela Wolf

2

Dear Daniela,

metadata in multilingual journals is indeed a very important point. If I may add one thing to this: In some contexts, the title in its original language is of importance for users. So it would be wonderful, too, if besides the translatable title fields there was a new field for the “original title”, in the language used by the author. It could be shown to the reader using an additional field or a link for “metadata in original language”.

Best regards,
ojsbsb

3

Hi all,

The way multilingual content in OJS typically works is this: there’s a “primary” locale, which is the one your journal considers its highest priority; then there are other languages, which are optional. Authors etc. will be required to fill in the primary locale e.g. for titles, abstracts, etc., and can choose whether or not to fill in the others.

When a piece of data is to be displayed, OJS will first look for the user’s current language and prioritize that one if there’s data available. If not, it’ll use the primary locale.

So, it shouldn’t be necessary to paste in data for all languages; just make sure there’s data present for the primary locale, and if you don’t have translations available, leave the others blank.

Pasting untranslated content will have some negative side-effects; OJS won’t know whether or not data has actually been translated, so might present untranslated content to external systems e.g. via XML exports.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

4

Hi Alec,

thanks for your answer! That makes sense.

Kind regards
Daniela

6

Hi,

And how about this topic https://pkp.sfu.ca/support/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13021?

Regards

7

Hi @alonsoj,

I don’t think there’s been any activity since that thread’s last post. Our goals for improving these aspects are likely to focus on OJS 3.0, which is due for release this summer, rather than OJS 2.x.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

8

OJS allows to use multi-language data but some of them can have only one language. For example people (users, authors) are stored only in one language. It was in OJS 2, it persists in new OJS 3. May be it is insignificantly when all languages of journal use same alphabet but it is important when alphabets differ.

Russian journals have to use two languages — Russian and English, which use two alphabets: Cyrillic and Latin, so we made several hacks to our copies of OJS 2.4.2 (see old forum), but our changes are difficult to port into new version: I did it only once, to 2.4.7.1.

9

You might be interested in offering some use cases for the upcoming PKP Sprint. One of the likely topics will be multilingual names.

See also this thread: Dual language journal - #13 by shoorick