Why does OJS distinguish between language and locale for each article?

One can set a language and also a locale for each article. While the first is something like en, the second is something more specific like _ en_US _. But why do the system need both. Which is used for what?

Greetings @paf,

I want to extend this question for OJS3. While my journal primal locale is English, after this fix, which is planned for 3.0.1, all article meta will be on article`s language but on on primary OJS language. English is international scientific language for now and all metatags principally should be on this language. Maybe there is a rationale for adding option to switch language for meta?

Hi all,

@paf, this is mostly for historical reasons – the Language field dates back to the first releases of OJS 2.x, before multilingual support was especially comprehensive. It’s not standardized in any way, meaning that users can enter whatever they want.

The submission locale, by contrast, is machine readable, meaning OJS can do more meaningful things with the information.

However, the submission locale can only (currently) support the set of languages that OJS supports, which can be a limitation for certain journals.

With OJS 3.x, you’ll be able to turn on or off the display and use of the Language field; the submission locale is often implicit and will only be displayed when there are several options.

@Vitaliy, we try not to assume that English is what everyone’s going to use; where possible, we try to provide meta tags and import/export support with as many languages as the various standards can handle, allowing them to make the decision. Failing that, we try to provide metadata in the most “complete” locale available, which is typically the submission locale (for submissions) and the journal’s primary locale (for journal settings etc).

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

@asmecher thank you for the explanation. So I don’t worry about the language field any more.

@asmecher thanks for the explanation. I am working on OJS 2.4.8.1; I read that it is irrelevant what’s written in the language-field within the metadata-set.
But I was wondering where I can change/add the language information such as en_US in the frontend?

Hi @lcbossert,

Can you describe what you’d like to do with the language codes?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

On the one hand the submission language seems to be the reason for displaying the language on the button which leads to the pdf (which can be changed here and I have been looking for: index.php/JOURNALSHORTNAME/editor/editGalley/NUMBER-OF-ARTICLE/NUMBER-OF-GALLEY) and the locale language which seems to have no effect - as I understand your post above (index.php/JOURNALSHORTNAME/editor/submission/NUMBER-OF-ARTICLE).

But somehow the URN (with the URN-DNB-Plugin) will only displayed if the two languages are congruently set up (both has to be english, german etc). Might be off topic in this tread but nevertheless a strange behaviour.

Hi @lcbossert

Concerning URN-DNB-Plugin: s. https://pkp.sfu.ca/wiki/index.php?title=URNPlugIn_Doku#DNB-URN. I.e. the DNB policy is, that all full texts that have an URN have to be long term archived. Because no automatic archiving with DNB was possible and we were trying to implement it via OAI, in a format that could only deliver one metadata set per article, it was decided to first only consider the main article language. At that time the editor could not change/define the submission language and thus define what is the primary/main article language the URN can be assigned to – there could be galleys/full text in several languages – so the first entered language in the language metadata field is used for that. And then, the galley/full text that should get the URN has to be in that same language.

Best,
Bozana