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lang-group Language Group (multi-language)

Used to associate alternate language versions (variants) of the same content, which JATS calls members of a language group.

Why Language Groups: When substantial portions of document content are in more than one language, the same structures are often repeated, once in each language. These parallel structures (English phrase meaning the same content, differing only by language) need not be co-located in the document and a single language need not be contiguous. As an example, alternate sections could repeat the same content in French and English. As another example, a paragraph could also be repeated, first in Greek, then in Romanian, and then in Italian. The same figure could be presented in Spanish, English, and Portuguese.

Attributes Bind Language Groups: Members of a language group use the @lang-group attribute to associate the members of the group together. The value of the @lang-group attribute, which is the same for all members of the group, is an IDREF attribute pointing to the @id of one of the group members. The group member with the ID even points to itself.

The members of a language group need not be contiguous. That is, they may appear next to each other, but they may also appear in different places within a document. The members are bound together by the IDREF.

How Language Groups May be Used: Desirable functionality for language groups in an online environment might include:

allowing the user to choose whether to see one version (or another version) or all versions, and
allowing a user to find an article in a search using a filter specifying a particular language.

For example, for an article produced in both English and Spanish, a user could opt to see only the Spanish, only the English, or both. This would be a function of the display application supported by the JATS markup.

Value	Meaning
An IDREF, which means that this attribute points to the identifier (tagged as an @id attribute) of one member of a language group	Used to associate the members of a language group. All the elements inside a language group identified with the same @rid are alternative versions (variants) of the same content in different languages. (Note: Since all members of a language group point to the same @id, one member of a language group will point to the @id of its own element.)
Restriction	@lang-group is an optional attribute; there is no default.

<article dtd-version="1.4" xml:lang="en"   >
<processing-meta lang-grouping="yes"/>
<front>...
<article-meta>...
<content-language>es</content-language>
<content-language>en</content-language>...
</article-meta>
</front>
<body>
...
<fig id="f0001" lang-group="f0001"  
  xml:lang="es" lang-variant="original" 
  lang-source="author" lang-focus="primary"
  position="float" fig-type="scatter-graph" >
 <label>Figura 1.</label>
 <caption><p>Evolución de la tasa de repetición en  
  todas las secuencias</p></caption>
...
</fig>

<fig id="f0005" lang-group="f0001"  
  xml:lang="en" lang-variant="translation" 
  lang-source="translator" lang-focus="secondary"
  position="float" fig-type="scatter-graph" >
 <label>Figure 1.</label>
 <caption><p>Evolution of the repetition rate in all sequences</p></caption>
 ...
</fig>
...
</body>
</article>

Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Library NISO JATS Version 1.4 (ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2024)

lang-group Language Group (multi-language)

Usage/Remarks

2 Variant figures, with <processing-meta> and <content-language>