Taxonomies and multilingual

[John Thiesen]

I'm part of a consortium using AtoM where we have one participant now entering data while having their AtoM interface set to German. We've discovered that the access point taxonomies that were entered under English don't show up. For example, only subject access points entered in German show up.

Is that way it's supposed to work? Or is there some setting that can be changed to allow a data entry person to see the whole taxonomy regardless of language?

[Dan Gillean]

Hi John, 

While we aim to make AtoM fully multilingual, there are still many quirks and issues to be resolved and improved upon. One of these is culture fallback - when a term translation is unavailable, AtoM should fall back to displaying the original source string. This works in most view pages, but currently not in many of AtoM's selects, such as the autocomplete fields in edit pages.

I can't think of an easy setting or minor code change that can resolve this in the short-term. The easiest workaround will be to add English translations to these German terms, which can be done simply by navigating to the term view page, flipping the user interface to English, and entering edit mode - you should be able to add the English translation to the term that way. 

Be aware that there are a couple known issues translating all the fields available in the terms module - we've resolved one issue for 2.7 and hope to address the other, depending on time and effort involved. See: 

• https://projects.artefactual.com/issues/13563
  
• https://projects.artefactual.com/issues/13580
  

For now, translating the authorized form of name should not cause issues. 

If the terms in question have been entered using English, but in the German data entry screen, then it's possible we could construct a SQL query that will change these terms source culture to English instead. I couldn't find a ready example of this (though I did find a previously shared way to add translations for a taxonomy name), but I can follow up with our developers if this would be helpful. 

Cheers, 

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Program Manager
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056

@accesstomemory

he / him

On Wed, Feb 9, 2022 at 2:57 PM John Thiesen <thie...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm part of a consortium using AtoM where we have one participant now entering data while having their AtoM interface set to German. We've discovered that the access point taxonomies that were entered under English don't show up. For example, only subject access points entered in German show up.

Is that way it's supposed to work? Or is there some setting that can be changed to allow a data entry person to see the whole taxonomy regardless of language?

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[John Thiesen]

Thanks for answering Dan. I'm not sure I entirely understand.

My basic question is that when a person is adding access point to an archival item while they are set as German language, then the drop down lists they see contain only the terms entered while the user was set to German. What would be useful would be to be able to see all of the access points in the relevant taxonomy, whether they were entered while set as English or German. Or, in the same way, a person working while set to English would be able to choose from any of the access points whether English or German. The way it looks now to the data entry person is almost as if there were 2 separate databases, one English and one German, and they can't easily pull access terms from both.

[Dan Gillean]

Hi John, 

Sorry if that wasn't clear. 

I agree that this is something that should be addressed in AtoM. I wasn't able to find a bug ticket describing that exact issue, so I'll try to do some testing myself and file a bug ticket, so we can track this and hopefully address it in a future release. 

There's no easy short term fix I can think of at the moment, but as a workaround, if the terms entered in the German UI are given translations in the English UI, then they should become available in the English UI autocompletes for adding access points and vice-versa. 

So: 

• Go to the relevant taxonomy via Manage > Terms, and find a term that was entered in the German UI. 
• If for some reason they also do not list in the taxonomy when in the English UI, then flip the UI to German using the language menu until you find one
• Go the target term's viewpage
• Use the language menu to flip the UI to English, if it's not already
• Enter edit mode
• The original German should be displayed above the term name field, allowing you to enter an English translation. Do so, then save the term
• Now when you return to a description and try to add an access point in the English UI, the English translation should be available in the access point autocomplete

The opposite can also be done - adding German translations to terms originally created in English. 

Hope that is clearer! 

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Program Manager
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056

@accesstomemory

he / him

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[John Thiesen]

Ok, thanks. We'll do some experimenting with this.

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