Untranslated authority records not shown properly in multilingual sites (AtoM v2.9.1)

[TeD TeD]

Hello everyone,

I recently did a test upgrade in a clone VM of our production Ubuntu 20.04/AtoM 2.7.3 system to Ubuntu 24.04/AtoM 2.9.1 following the excellent guide, with all the other requirements satisfied.
I experienced some minor display issues mainly because I had to switch to the bootstrap 5 theme (and I had applied a very subtle customization in the old theme), but in general the upgrade worked smoothly! Hooray!

Having said that, I have a multilingual site and I experience the following strange issue regarding non translated Authority records (ISAAR)

ALL names/authority entities appear as "Untitled" if the UI language is different from the language of the data in that authority. So for Greek names and English UI:

For the same Greek names, in the Greek UI, everything is shown as expected:

This happens ONLY in names/authorities, other entities (ie subjects) show the original string if the translation does not exist, as expected [1]

Any ideas what I could do? Is this a bug?

Thanks in advance!

Theodoros Theodoropoulos

[1] Multilingual design principles

[Hans-Arno Mielsch]

No, I do not believe this is is a bug.

I see the same effect (in german).

If I want to show an english name, I click on the "Untitled"-link and go into edit-mode of the identification area (still with language "english").

There you will see the hint about "other languages available" and you may input a name below the deactivated entry in Greek.

Put in there the english name and save.

Hope it helps,

-Hans-Arno

[TeD TeD]

Dear Hans,

I know the procedure you describe, however, the reason I still believe it's a bug, is because:
- As I mentioned, in ALL other entities (ie Title, subjects, Conditions governing access, Appraisal, Archival history, etc), if a translation of a term doesn't exist, then instead of "Untitled", the original value is displayed.
- In https://www.accesstomemory.org/en/docs/2.9/user-manual/translate/multilingual-design-principles/ it is clearly stated that: "When switching the user interface to a preferred language, database content should also switch, if a translation is available; if not, the content remains in the original source language."

- The EXACT same slug is displaying properly in AtoM 1.7.x

Best regards,
Theodoros

[TeD TeD]

I've done some digging into the code but found nothing interesting...

For example,  atom/plugins/qtAccessionPlugin/lib/model/QubitAccession.php has not changed the last 4 years (apart from some cosmetic changes), neither ./arDominionB5Plugin/modules/informationobject/templates/_creatorDetail.php.

Functions getActors and getCreators look the same.

I've tried forcing ['cultureFallback' => true] as an option to getCreators in _creatorDetail.php to no avail!
I even tried changing the getActors function in QubitAccession.php to behave as if 'cultureFallback' was true.
I still get Undefined when the browser culture is different from the culture when the name was created. And this happens mostly for names!

Any ideas?

Most of all, I'm puzzled why my production system (based on AtoM 1.7.x) works as expected for the same slug!

Thanks in advance,
Theodoros

[TeD TeD]

Anvit found the culprit! See https://github.com/artefactual/atom/issues/2050
I applied the proposed changes to /lib/model/om/BaseProperty.php and /lib/model/om/BaseActor.php and now all my issues are gone!

A big thank you to Daniel for mentioning his problem (that was apparently related to mine) and Anvit and melaniekung from Artefactual who dealt with it!