Re: 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<[email protected]>  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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