I18N and Metadata Translations for Data Package

How should the standard support titles, descriptions and data fields in languages other than English?

Proposal (Nov 2016)

An internationalised field:

# i18n
"title": { 
    "": "Israel's 2015 budget", 
    "he-IL": "תקציב לשנת 2015", 
    "es": "Presupuestos Generales del Estado para el año 2015 de Israel" 
}
...

Summary:

Each localizable string in datapackage.json could take two forms:

• A simple string (for backward compatibility)
• An object, mapping from ISO Locale codes (with or without the region specification, e.g. ‘en’, or ‘es-ES’) to their representations.
• In this object, you could have an empty key “” which denotes the ‘default’ representation

Not all properties would be localizable for now. For the sake of simplicity, we limit this to only the following properties;

• title (at package and resource level)
• description (at package and resource level)

Default Language

You can define the default language for a data package using a lang attribute:

"lang": "en"

The default language if none is specified is English (?).

[rufuspollock]

So, I’ve thought quite a bit about this and I generally agree with @akariv approach:

"title": { 
    "": "Israel's 2015 budget", 
    "he-IL": "תקציב לשנת 2015", 
    "es": "Presupuestos Generales del Estado para el año 2015 de Israel" 
}
...

I’ve updated the main description of the issue with a relatively full spec based on this.

Welcome comments from @frictionlessdata/specs-working-group

Research

• JSON-LD: http://json-ld.org/spec/latest/json-ld/#string-internationalization
  • Has approach we have here plus some other more subtle options related to specifics of JSON-LD
• Originally quite liked title@en. However, this does not seem common and JSON-LD no longer supports this. As @akariv points out it does not necessarily sort well and bloats the top level of the JSON. Also the @ in json property names is kind of annoying.
• It is also what I see around on the web e.g. https://www.drzon.net/approaches-to-json-internationalisation-i18n/

[ppKrauss]

Hi, no news here (only later v1.1)?

---

If “real life example” is useful to this discussion … My approach (while no v1.1) at datasets-br/state-codes’s datapackage.json, was to add lang descriptor and lang-suffix differentiator. The lang at source level, as default for all fields.

Hum… the interpretation was “language of the descriptions (!and CSV textual contents)”.

If some field or descriptor need to use other language, I use a suffix -{lang}. In the example we used title as default (en) and title-pt for Portuguese title.