projectblacklight
Support for multilingual description
Support parallel versions of descriptive elements, e.g. English and Italian text for a scope and contents note (needed for Bassi-Veratti collection); ideally would tie into switching UI language.
Duke: EAD3 has a nice model for multi-lingual description using @script attribute, but currently ASpace does not.
From a UI perspective, which scenario below do we want to support? Assume we've indexed a finding aid with both English and Italian values for metadata fields such as scope note (and that English is the "default" language).
Approach A: When the user chooses Italian as the site language (using the affordance we add to the UI to support #544), we display the Italian values for metadata fields that have values in Italian, and English values for any fields that exist but don't have Italian translations (i.e., Italian when available, fall back to English when not).
Approach B: When the user chooses Italian as the site language, we display the Italian values for metadata fields that have values in Italian, and omit display of any fields that don't have Italian values.
Approach C: When the user chooses Italian as the site language, we display all metadata fields that have either an English or an Italian value, showing all instances of values that exist (i.e., show both English and Italian values for a given field when available, just English or Italian when only one exists).
I assume Approach A is what we want to do, but think we might want to get broader input from potential implementers to make sure they are not expecting Approach C (Approach B doesn't seem very feasible, just included it for completeness).
I assume that we want Approach A, but I agree that it merits further discussion. Thanks!