Use case
In some cases, a IIIF resource may have a title or description (label or summary) in more than one language; or, the publisher of the content may want to provide descriptive metadata field labels in multiple languages for different language audiences, for example supplying a label for a creator field in both English and French (“Creator”, “Auteur”).
Implementation notes
With IIIF Presentation API 3.0, language maps are mandatory for strings that are intended to be displayed to the user. Languages are specified using a JSON key/value pair where the specified language is the key following BCP 47 language codes and the value is an array, for example: "en": ["Whistler's Mother"]. If the language is not known or the string does not have a language, then the key must be the string none.
A client will choose the appropriate value(s) by following the processing rules provided in the Language of Property Values section of the IIIF Presentation API 3.0 specification.
Language keys should be associated with the Manifest label and summary properties, as well as the label and value properties of the metadata and requiredStatement descriptive properties.
Restrictions
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Note that the implementation described here does not apply to embedded textual bodies in Annotations, which use the Web Annotation pattern of value and language as separate properties.
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It should be noted that BCP 47 allows hyphen breaks for locale and scripts (e.g. en-US); however, if you are processing these manifests with Javascript it will break the . notation features for navigating JSON objects so brackets for accessing language properties are recommended.
Example
In this example, the content is an image of the painting commonly known as Whistler’s Mother by James Abbott McNeill Whistler. The Manifest label property has both the English and French titles (lines 6-11).
In the metadata and requiredStatement properties, the label strings for “Creator”, “Subject” and “Held by” fields (lines 16-21, 31-36, 58-63) are supplied in both English and French. The value for the “Subject” field (lines 39-44) is supplied in both English and French, while the values for the “Creator” and “Held by” fields (lines 24-26, 66-68) have no specified language, so use “none” for the language map.
Finally, the summary property (lines 49-54) has values in both English and French.
With the Universal Viewer, Mirador, and Glycerine you can open the settings menu (gear icon) and choose either English or French.
For the Curation viewer you need to add a lang=fr parameter to access the French properties. You can see the French values on the IIIF Curation Viewer demo site.
Note not all viewers support all languages and users should check the viewers with their manifests to see if they need to configure the viewer to make the extra languages available.
The image in this example was sourced via Wikimedia Commons and is public domain.
JSON-LD | View in Universal Viewer | View in Mirador | View in Annona | View in Glycerine Viewer | View in Theseus | View in IIIF Curation Viewer
Code samples: Python: iiif-prezi3