User information form in different languages? Help!

[vizlipuzli]

Our journal has two language versions. First I found that OJS fits well to our purpose. Unfortunatly I could not fill author's information forms (including author's name) in different languages. I used Current Stable Release as well as Current Development Release without sucess. Is this some kind of bug or feature? This is extremly important that author's information appear at appropriate language on the journal web pages.
Help!

[jmacgreg]

Hi vizlipuzli,

Not all fields are multilingual -- just fields where we think there is a reasonable chance that they should be, for example article title, abstract, etc., and some but not all profile fields. However, we are always happy to take suggestions as to making further fields multilingual, so please feel free to let us know which further ones you would like (along with your rationale, if possible).

You will also find that the multilingual interface in OJS 2.3.3 has been tweaked a fair bit; we're releasing that version in mid-September, so you may want to wait a bit.

Cheers,
James

[vizlipuzli]

Hi James,

we will be very happy to fine multilingual feature for author's information in new releas. We have more than twenty journals that are published in two languages.
We can not publish articles in English in which the names of the authors and their affiliation are written in Cyrillic.

Looking forward to new release!!!

[jmacgreg]

Hi Vizlipuzli,

I actually added the option for author names to be treated multilingual-y as a feature request a while ago, but it has not yet been implemented: http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5598. Please feel free to CC yourself to that report for future updates; I just reassigned it to OJS 2.3.4, so hopefully it will be implemented in the near future.

Cheers,
James

[vizlipuzli]

I would like to note that if journal issued in two different languages they should have two different ISSN numbers!
Contact information and address are also have to be multilingual.
So I would like to ask about adding multilingual feature for all fields in "Journal Setup" section.
It is really very important for multilingual journals that use languages with different alphabets.

[jmacgreg]

Hi vizlipuzli,

Could you provide more information about these ISSN requirements? I took a look at the ISSN website, but couldn't find anything that would suggest different ISSNs are needed for different languages; the closest I found seemed to suggest that only one would be needed:

When a publication is published in different media, with the same title or not, different ISSN and key titles shall be assigned to the different media editions.

However, the same ISSN can be used for different file formats (ASCII, PostScript, Hypertext) of the same online publication. The same applies for a multiple physical format publication (for example a print publication with a CD-ROM included or a Video recording …) only one ISSN will be assigned.

Cheers,
James

[vizlipuzli]

"Separate ISSN are also required for serials issued in different language, geographic, or audience editions. " http://www.loc.gov/issn/issnbro.html
"Are different ISBNs used if a book appears in different languages? Yes. Each language version is a different product." http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/about/faqs_main.html#Anchor9


Example:

Molekulyarnaya Biologiya
Mol Biol
Published/Hosted by International Academic Publishing Co (Nauka/Interperiodica). ISSN: 0026-8984.
Russian version of Molecular Biology (0026-8933).
http://journalseek.net/cgi-bin/journalseek/journalsearch.cgi?field=issn&query=0026-8984

[jmacgreg]

Hi vizlipuzli,

Strictly speaking, you aren't publishing different *editions* of the same journal -- you are publishing a single edition that contains articles in multiple languages. All other article information besides translated data and metadata, including DOI information etc., stays the same; so I think in this case, the ISSN should also stay the same. I'll ask other team members to weigh in on this if they have further thoughts.

Cheers,
James

[vizlipuzli]

Hi James

you are publishing a single edition that contains articles in multiple languages

no! we are publishing more then 100 journals which has both russian and english issues with the same articles. http://maik.ru/cgi-perl/journals.cgi?action=&lang=eng
Manuscript can be sumbited in russian or in english and translated by our editors to the second language when manuscript is accepted. So journal Molecular Biology (ISSN 0026-8933) it is english translation of journal Molecularnaya Biologiya (ISSN 0026-8984)


Another example - journal 'Acoustical Physics'/'Akusticheskii zhurnal'
Jounal in Russian (ISSN PRINT: 0320-7919) http://maik.ru/cgi-perl/journal.pl?lang=eng&name=akust
and its translation in English (ISSN PRINT: 1063-7710) http://maik.ru/cgi-perl/journal.pl?lang=eng&name=acoust

So all fields for multilingual journals should be really multilingual including ISSN, Author Names and Affiliations, page numbers and so on... All
If it could help you I can e-mail you two pfd files of one article in two languages from multilingual journal.

Thanks in advance
Philipp

[jmacgreg]

Hi Philipp,

Thanks for clarifying! I think that, in general, my last comment still stands: typical OJS users use it to publish either one edition of one journal, in multiple locales, in which case only one ISSN is needed; or multiple journals/multiple editions of a given journal separately (each created as a new hosted journal in the Site Administrator interface), in which case a new ISSN can be given to each hosted journal/edition. However, if you are planning on hosting many journals in OJS, and need it modified to suit your needs, please let us know -- if you have development resources on hand, we may be able to provide some advice/tips for extending the system.

Cheers,
James

[vizlipuzli]

Hi James

currently I'm trying to transfer one of the journal site to OJS. If I'll seccess I will transfer all journals to OJS.
So yes, I need these modifications... I need from OJS full multilingual support.

Thank you in advance
Philipp

[asmecher]

Hi all,

Philipp, this is the first time we've had a request for author names to be provided in several languages -- though of course it does make sense for a number of languages. We prioritize feature requests in part by the portion of the community that will be able to make use of it, and also in part by the complexity of the task.

The answer to whether or not ISSNs need to be different for different languages seems to be ambiguous -- it's still skewed towards print publication, and multilingual publication online doesn't exactly match the policies you'd use for print. However, if we support ISSNs as a multilingual field, it'll permit them to be entered either in one language or several, and thus both situations will be supported. Downstream, there are some unanswered questions, because ISSNs are e.g. exported into a number of third-party formats, many of which will not support multiple ISSNs, meaning that we'll have to choose which to use (probably arbitrarily). None of this would require a very large code change.

For author names, the system is already prepared to store arbitrary metadata in multiple languages, but a number of queries currently operate on the existing author fields and these would all need to be changed.

I think both of these requests would be good to tackle and are suitable for filing in Bugzilla -- but at the moment, neither would be a huge priority because it's a limited portion of users who would be affected. If you have any developer time to invest in this, I'd be happy to provide some guidance.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[legofish]

for what it's worth, I'm also very interested in having multi-lingual author names. We are having a lot of trouble with this in our Persian journal since we don't have this feature. This means that we either have to display names in Farsi characters on the English pages, or show names with English alphabet on the Persian pages.

[vlilloh]

Hi,

The only thing from what I read here that it would be mainly necessary multilingual are the page numbers. Well, obviously in a print edition, a galley in Spanish will have different page numbers to a galley in English.

Cheers.

[andrisxamolins]

Dear developers,
are there some news on the bilingual names of authors and "people"? Are there plans to implement this. There was some patch published already a year ago.