ISO 639-1 vs ISO 639-2 language codes

[Emily Sommers]

Hi,

I'm working with a student who is describing an archival collection of materials that includes materials written in the Blissymbols language.

This language does not have an ISO 639-1 code, only 639-2 (zbl).

We noticed in the documentation that AtoM only accepts 639-1's two letter codes, but curiously, Blissymbols is available as a selection in the Language of Material dropdown in the user interface and when I tested out a csv import, it also worked with the 3-letter code (zbl) in the language column of the spreadsheet.

I guess my question is - are all 639-2 language codes now in AtoM, or only some? Did we somehow accidentally add this to our local taxonomy (without me realizing? I didn't see this taxonomy in the list of ones that can be edited from the taxonomies section)

Thanks in advance!

-Emily

[Dan Gillean]

Hi Emily, 

It's ....complicated, unfortunately. For a more technical explanation from our developers, you can see this comment (and the ones that follow) on this older issue ticket about 3-letter codes in AtoM:

• https://projects.artefactual.com/issues/13181#note-2
  

My dumbed-down version of this (which might not be 100% technically accurate but gets the gist of it in terms of outcomes):

• Languages are not kept in a user-editable taxonomy - instead, they are controlled lists included in the Symfony framework by default
• Symfony still only actually supports the use of 639-1 two-letter codes for actually supporting languages for display or translation
• HOWEVER, for some reason it uses a 639-2 list for ALL language drop-downs, like the one you see in the Language of Material field
• It also uses this wrong list in the i18n languages setting page, despite the fact that this includes languages that can never be properly added - this is what issue #13181 describes

So, when I first filed issue #13181, I thought there was a bug preventing any 3-letter languages from being properly added to the language settings. What I learned from the developers via that ticket is this mismatch in the Symfony framework language support. 

Adding support for 639-2 and 639-3 three-letter culture codes would be great - however, this involves a lot of deep customization changes in Symfony 1.x itself, which risks breaking AtoM in unexpected ways if we mess anything up, and makes ongoing maintenance much harder. 

Instead, the recommended fix on that issue ticket (which is still a significant piece of work, and therefore as of yet not undertaken) is to filter the list so that only supported 639-1 languages will be shown in the culture settings page, avoiding confusion. We can still let people use the full list in metadata fields like Language of Material and Language of Description, but there's no easy way to update the culture support in AtoM for all these additional codes. 

Sorry for the confusion! 

Regards, 

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

@accesstomemory

he / him

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[Emily Sommers]

Thanks Dan - I appreciate you taking the time to explain things. Always great to learn more about how some things work "under the hood".

 

Best,

Emily

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