museum-digital:blog - Multilinguality

Hindi

2025-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

After Kannada, Tamil and Telugu, museum-digital can now also be browsed in Hindi. As always, thanks and enjoy!

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Image credits

“Devanagari_letters.svg” is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, by बडा काजी, and retrieved via Wikipedia Commons.

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Browse museum-digital in: Telugu

2025-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

After we were gladly able to release the Tamil translation of museum-digital’s public portals last week, we are equally glad to do so with the all-new Telugu translation.

As always, many thanks to everyone who’s made that possible!

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Image credits

“Telugu consonants.svg” von Psiĥedelisto, lizensiert unter CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Browse museum-digital in: Tamil

2025-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

Today, we’re happy to release the Tamil translation of the public frontend of museum-digital. Thanks to everybody who’s made that possible!

As always, users with browsers set to using Tamil as their main language will now automatically see the Tamil translation of the site navigation etc. Others can select to navigate the site in Tamil using the language selector at the top right.

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Image Credits

“Tamil Community - Worldwide.PNG” von Coppercholride, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

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This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

State of Dev, March & April 2025

2025-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

Frontend

A Kannada translation of the software is now available
Museums can now select to display their own citation notes in the menu for such on object pages
This is especially relevant in case the object itself is to be cited (rather than its record online).
“Or” search queries can be combined within one search parameter for select attribute search types, e.g. places and tags. The Syntax is as follows: place:61~1
- For now, this can only be used using the internal query language. As such, there is no corresponding option in the UI for search settings. On the other hand, the search option is thus available using the API.
- This option is not available when searching for times or full events

musdb

Institution-wide settings
- Free text fields that double with similar controlled fields may now be hidden
  - The acquisition of an object may e.g. be directly recorded on the context of a given object or as a separate acquisition process. Recording it as an acquisition process is slightly more labor-intensive, but allows a more fine-grained and accurate documentation. With the new setting, the data fields for recording acquisitions directly in the object context can be hidden from all users of a museum to ensure a uniform use of the preferred functionality.
  - Institution-specific notes on how to cite objects may now be recorded for display on published object pages.
Search queries for inventory numbers are now character-level searches again (rather than following a fulltext search logic)
Some event types are incomplete, i.e. they cannot contain a place, or an actor, or a time. This incompleteness was handled differently between musdb, the import tool, and the CSVXML import preparation tool. Now, it is determined by a centralized list and thus similar across all of museum-digital.
Refactoring of the administrative command line interface
This mainly concerns auto-correction tools, but also results in that exports for the quick export option are now automatically generated daily.
Separated measurements are now positioned at the very top of the “addendum” tab of object editing pages.
It is now possible to record web links for object groups

Importer

The import tool can now be used as a harvester
- First use case is a harvester for LIDO records delivered via an OAI-PMH interface.
Externally stored images in formats other than JPG can now be imported
Significantly extended the LIDO parser to (among others) support the import of multilingual object data

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AI Use

Post image generated using AI.

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This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Kannada

2025-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

There’s lots of talk about the FAIR principles - publishing findable and accessible data. Logically, to be findable and accessible, the data should at the very least be described in the language of users, even if it is not itself translated. And that means, that before object information becomes multilingual, platforms should become (more) multilingual and especially cover languages that may not be in the first line of languages covered by your next-door Large Language Model for translation.

Today we can gladly announce another large step for making museum-digital more findable and accessible: The frontend is now available in Kannada.

Users with browsers set to using Kannada as their main language will now automatically see the Kannada translation of the site navigation etc. Others can select to navigate the site in Kannada using the language selector at the top right.

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musdb and frontend available in French and Russian

2022-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

In the last month we have been able to finally release the long-anticipated French and Russian translations of the frontend of museum-digital as well as musdb. A Ukrainian translation is currently being worked on as well. Thanks a lot to the colleagues from Speyer and Berlin-Karlshorst for organizing and translating!

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Türkçe

2020-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

The frontend of museum-digital is now available in Turkish. As a very nice side effect, this also unlocks the Turkish translations for keywords, and place and actor names we have been gathering for the last half a year.

A screenshot of the public frontend of museum-digital in Turkish. Currently, the “advanced search” page is opened.

Image credits: Eva Gonzalès: „Girl Awakening“, Kunsthalle Bremen – Der Kunstverein in Bremen (CC BY-NC-SA)

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Multilinguality in md:term

2020-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Since last weekend, the last publicly accessible page of museum-digital has been made fully multilingual: md:term. md:term is the central public frontend for our controlled vocabularies of actors, places, tags, and time terms.

The probably most important part of md:term is its API, which is also - for example - used by the “graph navigation” and is available for external use as well. Since we - like anywhere else - do not require authentication for accessing the md:term API, we don’t have a full list of API consumers which we could contact about API changes. Hence, we hope that this blog post will also alert them to make necessary changes.

How then, is md:term made multilingual? And how does it express itself in md:term?

Months ago, we implemented the multilinguality in our controlled vocabularies by adding an additional translation table, which means that there is the base entry, which is entered by the museums. The “norm data editors” then enrich the data and also attempt to add translations to a separate table by fetching data from Wikidata. If translations in the user’s language are available, they replace the “base entry” when outputting the data.

In the API, the base entries are replaced as well. If they are used, it hence makes sense to explicitly state the wanted language of the entry. To fetch German language information on Berlin easily, one should thus query <a href="https://term.museum-digital.de/md-de/place/61/json?lang=de">https://term.museum-digital.de/md-de/place/61/json?lang=de</a> instead of <a href="https://term.museum-digital.de/md-de/place/61/json">https://term.museum-digital.de/md-de/place/61/json</a> (which, before multilinguality, would have been the appropriate URL).

Alternatively, there is a new section in the JSON API: langs. All available translations can be found there listed by language.

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