Given how unsupported this is at the moment regardless of software, I wonder if a kluge might not be the way to go no matter what system you use, Christian? I.e. code the data with a wiki-style token that you could later use to extract a xml:lang attribute from. e.g. +fr+Les temps perdus; +en+Remembrance of things past

It might be much easier to build the language tokens into an existing bibliographic database than to build a bibliographic database from the ground up. How does MARC handle this?

Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Associate Professor,
Department of English,
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Canada

Chair, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/)
Director, Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)



-----Original Message-----
From: Christian Wittern [mailto:cwittern <at> gmail.com]
Sent: Tue 2010-01-12 5:14
To: refdb-users <at> lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Refdb-users] multlingual titles in refdb

Dear Markus,

Thanks for your answer.  What a pity, RefDB would otherwise quiet nicely
fit the bill.  Unfortunately, I am not aware of other software that
could do this.  MODS maybe could be shoehorned to support this, but last
time I checked it did not have xml:lang in the schema.  TEI could do
this, so I might have to go with a custom made XML database (eXist) or
some such

All the best,

Christian

On 2010-01-12 19:15, Markus Hoenicka wrote:
> Christian Wittern<cwittern <at> gmail.com>  was heard to say:
>
>   
>> Hi there,
>>
>> For a project here, I would like to adopt refdb for bibliographic data
>> management.  However, one of the requirements is to be able to have
>> multilingual titles, that is titles repeated for different languages.  As an
>> example, I might have a title of a Japanese paper in original script
>> (Kanji+Kana), Roman Transcription, translation into English, translation
>> into German etc.
>> I wonder how refdb could deal with this.  It appears that at the moment all
>> fields are language-agnostic, right?  Would it be possible to introduce
>> language at some level?
>>     
> Hi,
>
> RefDB cannot deal with this at the moment. Current practice in
> biomedical sciences is to provide the native title, followed by the
> translated title in square brackets. I'm well aware that this is not
> sufficient for the humanities.
>
> Adding language support to article and publication titles requires a
> couple of internal changes. Currently the title is part of the main
> reference entry, except for periodical titles which are already stored
> in a separate table. At this time RefDB only supports a fixed number
> of periodical synonyms. In order to support titles in different
> languages, we'd have to change this to a key-value kind of storage,
> with multiple keys indicating the type and language of a title. This
> is basically doable, but it will require quite a bit of coding time
> (which I'm particularly short of at the moment). Also, it will require
> extensions to the query language as you'd have to be able to query
> specific translations of a title to make full use of these changes,
> something like ":TX[en]:~whatever" to query the English version of a
> title. Adding language support to other fields (which ones would be
> required?) would follow the same pattern and would add quite a bit of
> complexity to the whole thing.
>
> To sum it up, RefDB could be modified to suit your needs, but this is
> nothing that I could do on a rainy sunday afternoon.
>
> regards,
> Markus
>
>
>
>
>
>   


--
  Christian Wittern
  Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
  47 Higashiogura-cho, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265, JAPAN


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