bidirectional text

[Elishai Cohen]

Hi all,

Can i change the bidirectional text in Arches from Left to right to right to left?

if so, where should i change it?

Thanks,

Elishai

[Alina Myklebust]

Hello Elishai,

Thank you for your question regarding bi-directional text in Arches.  Currently, we are discussing this on our team, and we hope to share our findings very soon.  I will follow up here as soon as I have more information.  

All the best,

Alina

[Dennis Wuthrich]

Hi Elishai,

Good question concerning bi-directional text in Arches.  This is just one of several things needed to support multi-lingual and multi-script support in the Arches user interface.  You might be aware that Arches v5 creates a good portion of its UI dynamically.  For example, the graph models and data entry forms in v5 are created dynamically by Arches, and this code would need to be updated to support bi-directional (and multi-lingual) support. And then there's the question of supporting multiple languages and scripts in the actual data that is managed by Arches....

As Alina mentioned in her post, we are thinking about the best way to address all the factors needed to support localization of the UI.  At the moment, you can't just "flip a switch" in Arches and have it support bi-directional text or alternate languages.

Best,

Dennis 

On Friday, June 26, 2020 at 1:11:19 AM UTC-7 elisha...@gmail.com wrote:

[Elishai Cohen]

Hi Alina, Hi Dennis

Thanks for your detailed answers. 

we would like to have the ability, of course not in the first steps, to switch by a button of something like that and you mentioned Dennis the next question is about the data that is managed in Arches.

it would be kind if you will share future insights on these topics.

----

Best regards,

Elishai Cohen

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[Adam Cox]

Hi all, I worked on the Egyptian Archaeological Database translation to Arabic (following steps that Andrea Zerbini had written down from his work on EAMENA) for Arches 3. What I recall is: Django handles translation in a way where you actually do kind of just "flip a switch." What I mean is that there is an underlying language setting, the properties of which (including directionality: request.lang.LANGUAGE_BIDI) can be acquired in templates with tags like these: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/topics/i18n/translation/#other-tags. I found that the automatic reordering of text that takes place in templates when you have a right-to-left language set is somewhat smart, but also quite finicky.

Most importantly, the language setting determines which set of translations will be used.

Arches doesn't expose a "switch-to-flip" to allow you to switch between languages, meaning the first thing you would need to do is either permanently change the LANGUAGE_CODE in settings.py or change a template somewhere to add a dropdown that would allow your users to do that. You would then need to follow standard Django steps toward creating "localization files" which hold translations of all of the strings in the interfaces (individual translations for which you will provide, using something like django rosetta which I found very easy to use).

As Dennis says, there is a lot of dynamically generated text exposed in the app, so I'll let the team speak to that, to say nothing of the data itself. In theory concept labels should be translated properly based on the language settings themselves (here's an old thread with Andrea and Alexei discuss that), but string values will not be translated (for good reason). In the EAD we ended up with two Description nodes (one in English and the other in Arabic) and I changed the report to look at the Django language settings and show only the appropriate node.

At any rate, I would recommend starting from the bottom (Django) up, and handling the special Arches cases as they come.

Adam

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