Localization of community and collection names and texts in Dspace 7

[Urban Andersson]

Not being able to use language controlled community and collection names has always (I think) been a major limitation in DSpace. In earlier (JSP) versions we solved this by using a workaround, similar to this: https://groups.google.com/g/dspace-community/c/6dwt-gjVPTo
but this seems not quite as easy to accomplish in Angular.   

Has anyone else had a look at this, and are there any suggestions on how to approach it?
Either by manipulating the app source or the data that is returned by the backend? I'd rather not write a new extension, but maybe this is the only way? 

Also, it would be nice if introductory texts (HTML) etc. of communities/collections could be presented in multiple languages. This could quite easily be accomplished by using CSS and named divs. But unfortunately html attributes, such as id and style, seem to be removed in the html output - i.e. <div id="swedish">text</div> is transformed to <div>text</div> in the UI. Or maybe I am doing something wrong here? 

Any thoughts or suggestions would be very welcome! If someone is already working on this I'd be happy to help out if I can.

Urban Andersson

Chalmers University of Technology

[pierre...@bibl.ulaval.ca]

Bonjour,

I agree that this is a limitation in DSpace. As collection and community are items in DSPace (and thus have there own metadata), maybe a way to solve this problem would be to allow language selections at the metadata level, like it could be done already for objects metadata (i.e abstracts). For collections, it would look like this: 

What do you think of this avenue to solve the problem?

There is already an issue for this on Github dspace-angular repository: https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/1464. We could build on it. 

Thanks!

Pierre Lasou

Université Laval

[Mark H. Wood]

Do you mean that the community and collection names should be
presented to the user in the best available match to user's requested
locale? That should not be difficult to implement, since these names
are the values of the corresponding 'dc.title' metadata rows for those
objects, and metadata fields can have multiple values with different
locales.

Many other features of Collection are stored in metadata:

o Introductory text: dc.description
o Short Description: dc.description.abstract
o Copyright text: dc.rights
o License: dc.rights.license

I haven't found where News is stored.

--
Mark H. Wood
Lead Technology Analyst

University Library
Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis
755 W. Michigan Street
Indianapolis, IN 46202
317-274-0749
www.ulib.iupui.edu

[Urban Andersson]

I believe this is the way to go! It would also be a sustainable solution, since you could also add more/new languages when needed, and there would be no changes to the backend/data model. And I presume the default lang specified would be used when there (for some reason) is no match. 

/ Urban 

[مسعود محمد الشريف‎]

Hello Urban,

A simple and quick solution to the bilingually issue of collections/ communities in DSpace is to use a delimiter, like the bar | , in between two text describing these entities and their metadata fields as needed. All is required is to split the text  at viewing time so that only the text in the currently active is displayed.

Here you will see the Arabic version of the communities/collections list:

https://repo-nu.maktabat-online.com/community-list

Now switch the language to the English interface, using the world icon on top, and you will see them all appear in English.

The same approach has been applied to the facets elements, where now see controlled values like names of formats/ types, universities/ colleges/ departments, entities, etc. in multiple languages. 

Thanks,

Massoud

KnowledgeWare

Sent from my iPhone

On 4 Oct 2022, at 2:20 PM, Urban Andersson <gub...@gmail.com> wrote:

I believe this is the way to go! It would also be a sustainable solution, since you could also add more/new languages when needed, and there would be no changes to the backend/data model. And I presume the default lang specified would be used when there (for some reason) is no match. 

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[Urban Andersson]

Hello Massoud,

That is how we used to fix it in earlier versions (jsp). But I have not figured out how to do it in Angular. I was thinking of a simple javascript, but I have not got around to that yet.

Would it be possible to have a look at how you do this in DSpace 7, i.e. where in the code this would go?

It would be a (more than) good enough quick fix for now. 

Many thanks!

/ Urban

4 okt. 2022 kl. 16:57 skrev مسعود محمد الشريف <mas...@kwareict.com>:



[Nurminen, Miika]

Hello,

just to second that community/collection localization in standard DSpace
would be most useful feature for non-English users so it's good to hear
that https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/1464 is considered
for 7.x roadmap.

At University of Jyväskylä localization for community/collection names
and descriptions was implemented with our earlier installation (1.7,
XMLUI) as early as in 2011. The approach was based by overriding XSL
transforms that showed community/collection names (e.g. templates like
collectionDetailList-DIM, communitySummaryList-DIM,
collectionDetailView-DIM, dri:trail), translations were read from
external XML file (since localizations were not yet as pert of
community/collection metadata).

Regardless of the framework used (unfortunately I'm not yet familiar
with Angular UI), with the current data model the language information
in community and collection metadata should be used directly instead of
parsing delimiters, provided that sufficient editing form for different
languages can be used, or imported from external source, e.g. using REST.


Best regards,
Miika Nurminen

>>> <https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/1464>. We could

>>> 317-274-0749 <tel:(317)%20274-0749>
>>> www.ulib.iupui.edu <http://www.ulib.iupui.edu>

>>>
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[Dan Scott]

On Friday, October 7, 2022 at 3:05:39 a.m. UTC-4 Nurminen, Miika wrote:

Hello,

just to second that community/collection localization in standard DSpace
would be most useful feature for non-English users so it's good to hear
that https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/1464 is considered
for 7.x roadmap.

At University of Jyväskylä localization for community/collection names
and descriptions was implemented with our earlier installation (1.7,
XMLUI) as early as in 2011. The approach was based by overriding XSL
transforms that showed community/collection names (e.g. templates like
collectionDetailList-DIM, communitySummaryList-DIM,
collectionDetailView-DIM, dri:trail), translations were read from
external XML file (since localizations were not yet as pert of
community/collection metadata).

Regardless of the framework used (unfortunately I'm not yet familiar
with Angular UI), with the current data model the language information
in community and collection metadata should be used directly instead of
parsing delimiters, provided that sufficient editing form for different
languages can be used, or imported from external source, e.g. using REST.


Best regards,
Miika Nurminen

As we're in the process of migrating our English & French instance from DSpace 6 to 7, I was a bit surprised to see that there still isn't out-of-the-box support for multilingual communities and collections pages.

This pull request for DSpace Angular (https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/pull/3078), in conjunction with this pull request for the REST API (https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/pull/9610), appears to address the feature requirements.

The pull requests missed the DSpace 8 release but hopefully they can be reviewed and merged as a feature for an upcoming release!