Re: [jats-list] Title language in multilingual documents

["Daniel Mietchen daniel.mietchen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <jats-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

I'm enjoying this discussion and would like us to also consider cases
where the title might involve more than one language. In areas like
Buddhist studies, for instance, it is quite common to have the title
using the grammar of one language but key elements being from another.
Some examples:
- Is RatnD
karaED
nti a gZhan stong pa?
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-018-9353-7
- Avataa9saka h/e4 Transnationalism in Modern Sinitic Buddhism
https://www.globalbuddhism.org/article/view/1224

I think I have also seen cases where more than two scripts have been
used in titles (e.g. Latin, Tibetan and Mandarin) but don't have an
example at hand.

Best,

Daniel

On Wed, Sep 17, 2025 at 1:32b/PM Chiara Del Vescovo
chiara.delvescovo@xxxxxxx <jats-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
>
> Hi Chandi and Vincent,
>
> Thank you for your responses so far! I just want to point out that I am not
looking at translations here, so the element <trans-title> and the attribute
@lang-group are out of scope. I am looking for the standardised way to express
the language of the title in a multilingual document. And more in general, to
understand how to make sure that a screen reader can pronounce a text
correctly.
>
> Vincent, thank you for the insight on browsers and systems mostly being
unable to process the "mul" value in @xml:lang, this is very interesting, and
something that was already on my "to investigate" list. I quite like the
solution that makes use of a specific language code as the "fall-back"
language of a document regardless of whether it's a mono- or a multi-lingual
document. Indeed, there is already the possibility to use multiple
<content-language> tags to express that a document is multi-lingual, and your
interpretation helps decoupling the two fields.
> I cannot really see how the value "mul" can be used at all, since:
>
> The presence of multiple <content-language> elements already means that a
document is multi-lingual, and
> "mul" doesn't provide any information about the language of any text, so
it's not used to process text either.
>
> I think I'll recommend OUP not to use the "mul" value at all. Unless someone
here has a convincing use-case for it, in which case I'm all ears!
>
> Just for completeness, BITS recommends using the IANA language code list
available at
https://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry/language-subtag-reg
istry. Do you have any recommended practice to share regarding this list?
>
> I also have a question on how to express the language of an extended part of
text in a multilingual document (my understanding is that this is provided by
using the element <sec>), but I think this is not in scope with this thread.
>
> Thank you again!
> Chiara
>
> Chiara Del Vescovo
>
> Senior Content Data Model Architect | Operations
>
> Oxford University Press
>
>
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