Multilingual description support — best practices?
Feb 19, 2026 11:18 AM
Our archive serves researchers in Spanish, Catalan, English, and French. We are looking for best practices on managing multilingual descriptions in Heratio.
Specifically:
- Should we create separate descriptions per language or use the i18n framework?
- How do you handle terms and taxonomies that don't translate directly?
- Any recommendations for machine translation as a starting point?
2 Replies
We manage Swedish, English, and Finnish descriptions. The i18n framework in Heratio works well — each description has culture-specific fields, and the system automatically falls back to the primary language if a translation is missing.
For machine translation, Heratio's AI plugin integrates with Argos Translate (offline, no API costs). Quality varies by language pair, but it saves significant time for initial drafts.
For taxonomy terms that don't translate directly, we maintain a "preferred label" in each language plus a "scope note" explaining the concept. This is especially important for terms rooted in cultural context.