Language Support

Language support is a different concern to translation support. Language support deals with declaring the default language of a descriptor and the data it contains in the resources array. Language support makes no claim about the presence of translations when one or more languages are supported in a descriptor or in data. Via the introduction of a languages array to any descriptor, we can declare the default language, and any other languages that SHOULD be found in the descriptor and the data.

Implementations

There are no known implementations of this pattern at present.

Specification

Any Frictionless Data descriptor can declare the language configuration of its metadata and data with the languages array.

languages MUST be an array, and the first item in the array is the default (non-translated) language.

If no languages array is present, the default language is English (en), and therefore is equivalent to:

{
  "name": "my-package",
  "languages": ["en"]
}

The presence of a languages array does not ensure that the metadata or the data has translations for all supported languages.

The descriptor and data sources MUST be in the default language. The descriptor and data sources MAY have translations for the other languages in the array, using the same language code. IF a translation is not present, implementing code MUST fallback to the default language string.

Example usage of languages, implemented in the metadata of a descriptor:

{
  "name": "sun-package",
  "languages": ["es", "en"],
  "title": "Sol"
}

# which is equivalent to
{
  "name": "sun-package",
  "languages": ["es", "en"],
  "title": {
    "": "Sol",
    "en": "Sun"
  }
}

Example usage of languages implemented in the data described by a resource:

# resource descriptor
{
  "name": "solar-system",
  "data": [ "solar-system.csv" ]
  "fields": [
    ...
  ],
  "languages": ["es", "en", "he", "fr", "ar"]
}

# data source
# some languages have translations, some do not
# assumes a certain translation pattern, see the related section
id,name,name@fr,name@he,name@en
1,Sol,Soleil,שמש,Sun
2,Luna,Lune,ירח,Moon