Informed Use of Multilingualism in PKP Software

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DAY MONTH YEAR

Open webinar offered by Public Knowledge Project & Érudit, as part of Coalition Publica

Emma Uhl, Public Knowledge Project�Jessica Clark, Érudit

April 27, 2023

This session is being recorded

Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash

Outline

• Brief intro to PKP, Érudit & Coalition Publica
• Informed Uses of Multilingualism
• Examples of Multilingual Journals in OJS
• Enabling and Configuring Languages in OJS
• Managing Multilingual Metadata
• Conclusion and Q&A

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Who is this for?

This webinar starts broadly and then becomes specific, considering a range of perspectives: someone considering adopting PKP software for multilingual publication, existing users who want to better understand particular settings in the software, and even non-users who want to understand how multiple languages work with indexing services.

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We encourage you to come back to this webinar later - we will be sure to share the recording and the slides so you can refer to them at any time!

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Additionally, a significant portion of the webinar is based on our newly created Using PKP Software in Multiple Languages documentation. �https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/multiling-guide/en/

Terms

• Metadata: Information about a publication - titles and subtitles, abstracts, keywords, author lists all count as metadata. Very important to libraries and indexing/discovery services like Google Scholar, Pubmed, Directory of Open Access Journals, etc.�
• UI: User interface, the part of a software that users interact with in order to accomplish tasks in the software - menus, dropdowns, dashboards.�
• Locale vs language: Used interchangeably throughout this webinar, locale is a computing term that refers to the package of files that allows a software to operate in another language.

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Intro to PKP, Erudit & Coalition Publica

Intro to PKP

A non-profit organization dedicated to developing open source software, conducting research, and furthering open access to scholarly research.

Founded in 1998 by John Willinsky at UBC (It’s our 25th birthday this year!)

Developer of Open Journal Systems, Open Monograph Press, and Open Preprint Systems

pkp.sfu.ca/

Intro to Érudit

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Érudit is a Canadian inter-university consortium whose mission is to support open digital publishing and research in the humanities and social sciences. Érudit provides a wide range of services in digital research, publishing and dissemination.

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The erudit.org platform is the leading digital dissemination platform of social sciences and humanities research in Canada. It hosts over 300 journals and its collections are consulted by the research community and the general public, including the users of over 1 100 institutions worldwide.

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Also our 25th birthday this year!

Intro to Coalition Publica

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Coalition Publica is a partnership between Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project to advance research dissemination and digital scholarly publishing in Canada. We support the Canadian social sciences and humanities journal community in the transition towards sustainable open access.

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Coalition Publica’s approach to bilingualism

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• Focus on mutual respect to foster productive collaboration between PKP and Érudit
• We have guidelines for bilingual meetings
• Respect everyone’s expertise
• Use French or English, as preferred
• Speak slowly and clearly
• Ask for clarification if you don’t understand
• Formal docs (like agendas) translated, for informal texts (like emails) people can use DeepL

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A Quick Disclaimer

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Recommended practices around multilingualism in scholarly publishing are part of an ongoing conversation. ��Some parts of this webinar are heavily influenced by our shared French/English bilingual Canadian context, and some things discussed here may not be the perfect fit for your journal. They may be better understood as a potential starting place for your regional language community to begin developing recommendations that suit a specific language.

Also: This webinar will often refer to OJS specifically, but the majority of this information applies to OMP and OPS as well!

Informed Uses of Multilingualism

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Multilingualism scenarios

Think carefully about how you want to use and set up languages.

�#1: Publishing articles in several languages without providing translations - for example, your journal may accept manuscripts in English and Spanish with the expectation that readers will either be fluent in both languages or willing to use translation tools.

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#2: Publishing articles with translations into other languages - where some or all articles, regardless of the article’s original language, will contain multiple versions in different languages.

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#3 Publishing articles with translated metadata - where some or all articles, regardless of the article’s original language, will have some metadata elements (ex: title, abstract, key words) in multiple languages (NB: some indexers don’t play nicely with this!)

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#4: Making the site interface available in multiple languages - maybe even if you don’t have the capacity to manage multilingual submissions

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Check the completeness of the software translation

PKP software relies on volunteer time and efforts for translations. Many translations are still only partially completed.�

https://translate.pkp.sfu.ca/languages/

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• If a language isn’t in the list, no one has started translating in that language yet
• Click the language to see what components have been translated
• Components are divided into
• Software type (OJS, OMP, OPS)
• Shared infrastructure (PKP Web Application Library)
• Plugin-Specific Components

Check the completeness of the software translation

Default Translation Plugin

One way to make incomplete translations a bit more usable is to enable the Default Translation Plugin in the plugin gallery.

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Untranslated text normally displays as a string ID (##something.like.this##). With the default translation plugin, the untranslated English text will be shown instead.

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Examples of Multilingual Journals in OJS

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Encounters

This is a trilingual (EN/FR/ES) journal that “aims to generate a vigorous scholarly dialogue among educational researchers from Canada, Spain and Latin America in the theories and histories of education”.

Encounters

It provides a user interface and much of its journal information in all three languages, and accepts and publishes in all three languages without providing translations.

East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies

This journal accepts submissions only in English, but provides translations of select articles in Ukrainian as a galley alongside the original article.

East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies

In this model, no metadata is translated and translations are treated simply as a supplemental galley available for a limited number of articles.�

Translations and information about the initiative are also compiled on a custom static page.

RPG学研究 (Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies)

An example of the user interface in a non-Latin language, as well as a demonstration of multiple galleys in varying formats and languages with fully translated metadata

RPG学研究 (Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies)

An example of the user interface in a non-Latin language, as well as a demonstration of multiple galleys in varying formats and languages with fully translated metadata

Canadian Medical Education Journal

An example of the translated metadata only approach - metadata is always available in both French and English even though articles are monolingual

مجلة دراسات الخليج والجزيرة العربية

(Journal of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies)

An example of a right-to-left oriented language in OJS

Enabling & Configuring Languages in OJS

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Installing new locales

Locales (the set of parameters and files that define a language in software) can be installed only by Site Administrators.

Enabling new locales

Primary locale

Only one language can be designated as the primary locale. You can consider this the “default” language. Your site will first be shown to users in this language.

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Be especially careful about your primary locale selection, as changing primary locale can have serious consequences for data across your site.

UI (User Interface)

When this is checked off, the front-end and back-end interfaces will be available in that language. This does not include anything you have manually entered such as journal descriptions.

Language Toggle

Forms

When enabled, any fillable forms in the system (with the notable exception of submission metadata) will be available in that language. This can be used to fill out content like journal descriptions, author submission checklists and guidelines, copyright notices, etc.

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This combined with the UI option is how a journal can achieve a fully-translated interface: the UI option enables the translation of default system text, and the Forms option enables the translation of manually entered text that appears on the site.

Forms

Forms - Globe Icons

Enabling Forms will also show icons next to any fillable fields that indicate the number of languages the form has been filled in. Green indicates that it’s been filled in all languages, red indicates that there are languages missing, while grey means the field has not been filled at all.

Forms + UI

Translations of default system text, highlighted here in red, are enabled by selecting the UI option for the selected language (French, in this example.)

Forms + UI

Translations of manually entered text, including custom navigation items, highlighted here in blue, are enabled by selecting the Forms option for the selected language and filling in the information for that language.

Submissions (Articles)

When this is checked, it will allow authors to specify the language of their article/submission, and enable authors, editors and journal managers to enter submission metadata in those languages.

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Metadata will only be required in the language set as the submission language.

Submissions

Additionally, translated metadata may be added when “Submissions” is enabled for additional languages regardless of the language selected for the submission

Managing Multilingual Metadata

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Context

• Canadian French-English bilingualism
• Coalition Publica transfers metadata & PDF galleys from OJS to the erudit.org platform
• Quality metadata is important
• Bilingual metadata is common

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What is metadata and why is it important?

• Metadata: Information about a publication - titles and subtitles, abstracts, keywords, author lists all count as metadata. Very important to libraries and indexing/discovery services like Google Scholar, Pubmed, Directory of Open Access Journals, etc.
• Metadata flows “downstream”
• Helps people find and use the content in your journal
• High-quality metadata improves discoverability, dissemination, and, arguably, research impact
• Poor metadata propagates just as efficiently as good metadata, reduces discoverability and takes lots of time and effort to correct�

OJS’s Limitations (right now)

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• Articles are tagged with their language at the moment of submission
• Currently no way to review or change this
• No way to display bilingual metadata side-by-side for the reader
• So we see a lot of journals misusing metadata fields for display purposes

Recommended settings

• Coalition Publica journals are required to enable the Locale, plus check Submissions for all languages in which they publish
• Enabling the UI is optional, though recommended for journals that provide translated metadata (ex: bilingual article titles, abstracts, or keywords)

Some thoughts on UI

• How do you decide if you enable the UI for a language? It helps to understand how multilingual metadata will display:

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Scenario 1

• When bilingual metadata is present and entered separately (as recommended), and the UI is enabled for both English and French:
• Users viewing your website in English will see only the English metadata;
• Users viewing your website in French will see only the French metadata.

Some thoughts on UI (cont’d)

Scenario 2

• When unilingual (ex: only English) metadata is present, with the UI enabled for both English and French:
• Users viewing your website in English or French will see the English metadata.

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Some thoughts on UI (cont’d)

Scenario 3

• When bilingual metadata is present and entered separately, but the UI for only one language (ex: English) is enabled:
• Users viewing your website in English will see only the English metadata;
• Users will not be able to see the French metadata.

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Other important considerations on UI

• Capacity to keep About and other general information up to date in both languages

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Galley Languages

• It is recommended that you select a language for each galley (PDFs, etc.) that corresponds to the main language of the article, especially when you have enabled the UI for multiple languages
• Why? Provides a signal to the user that they might be reading metadata in their language, but that the article is not in their language.

Galley Languages

Full translations

• We recommend that translations (i.e. a full article available in multiple languages) should be published as separate articles on OJS
• Why? Partly due to how OJS (and erudit.org too) handles DOIs (right now)…

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Example of a Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

Metadata recommendations

• Keep multilingual metadata separate:
• Never put English and French metadata in the same field.

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• Put metadata in the specific field for its language:
• Never put English metadata in a French-language field, or vice versa.

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Metadata recommendations (cont’d)

• Make sure multilingual metadata is complete:
• Make sure that all metadata included in galleys (PDFs, etc.) is present in OJS, and vice versa.

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• Do not:
• Publish a PDF galley with an abstract in English and French, but put only the English abstract in OJS
• Put keywords in English and French in OJS if there are no French keywords in the PDF galley

Metadata recommendations (cont’d)

• Don’t misuse metadata fields:
• Never use an OJS field for anything other than the metadata element it is intended to capture.

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• Do not:
• Put a translated article title in the article subtitle field, just so they display side-by-side

Final Thoughts on Metadata

• Quality metadata is important
• Some basic principles that will get you 90% there in having high-quality metadata, whether multilingual metadata or otherwise:
• Always make sure that all metadata in OJS and galleys (PDFs, etc.) is exactly the same.
• Always review metadata prior to publication.
• Metadata as the icing on the cake…

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Wrapping Up

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We’re in This Together

Although we hope that we were able to explain the various considerations, features, options, and potential issues for publishing in multiple languages…��Multilingualism in PKP software and scholarly publishing as a whole is not perfect!

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We rely heavily on community members and language users to tell us what’s working, what’s not working, and what’s missing.

Multilingual Support Going Forward

Many individuals have been working to support multilingualism in PKP software—through development, translation, feedback, research, participation in metadata working groups, and so much more.�

PKP intends to increase its efforts to support multilingualism and work more closely with regional communities in the near future through working groups and community engagement initiatives in 2023.

�We strongly encourage you to contribute or reach out to PKP and its community if you have suggestions about how our software could better serve your language community’s needs. ��https://pkp.sfu.ca/community/members/contribute/

Contribute or improve software translation

In order to have a fairly complete translation of a software (excluding plugins), generally the entirety of the corresponding software component (e.g. OJS) and at least some of the shared infrastructure component (i.e. PKP Web Application Library) will need to be translated.

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We have in-depth instructions on how to contribute translations:

https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/translating-guide/en/translate-software

But you are welcome to email emma@publicknowledgeproject.org and talk to me about your needs if you want to know more or receive additional guidance!

Documentation & Resources

PKP Documentation Hub� https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/

Using PKP Software in Multiple Languages

https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/multiling-guide/en/

Better Practices in Journal Metadata

https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/metadata-practices/en/

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Thank You!

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Thank you for listening to our webinar!

We hope this better explained some of the options available to you for using PKP software in multiple languages, and gives you some hints about how to construct useful author and editorial policies and guidelines for managing your multilingual metadata.

Questions?