I’ve been working on recommendations for multilingual support in repositories through a COAR task force, and it’s partly in that context that I’m trying to understand where we’re at with EPrints when it comes to supporting multiple languages.

Specifically, I was wondering about multilingual metadata fields.

I see that we have some documentation here:

https://wiki.eprints.org/w/Multilang_field

But when I tried to add a multilang field to see how and if that would work, I found that it did, when I used the “multiple” set to 1 (otherwise, there’s an error), like this:

{

    name => 'title_multilang',

    type => 'multilang',

            multiple => 1,

    fields => [

        {

            sub_name => 'text',

            type => 'text',

        },

    ],

},

In the EP3 XML export, that looked something like this:

<title_multilang>

      <item>

        <text>test</text>

        <lang>pl</lang>

      </item>

    </title_multilang>

But I didn’t find it in any other export format.

Am I correct in understanding that if I were to add multilingual metadata fields, I would also have to modify all of the export plugins’ code, including OAI-PMH, to export the multilingual fields correctly (i.e., along with the language name)?  Has this work been done already?

I also found this thread: https://www.eprints.org/eptech/msg05225.html

which suggested to me that multilingual fields cause problems when importing matadata. Have those issues been resolved since then (2015)? 

Thanks to anyone who has some experience or knowledge of this and other multilingual features in EPrints.

Tomasz