#782 Languages for VTs not being displayed

[Marc Kupper]

I was looking at the series http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?3792 and saw

1 Foundation's Fear (1997) by Gregory Benford also appeared as:
Variant Title: Foundation's Angst [Dutch] (1997)
Variant Title: Fondation en péril [French] (2002)
2 Foundation and Chaos (1998) by Greg Bear also appeared as:
Variant Title: Foundation en Chaos (1998)
3 Foundation's Triumph (1999) by David Brin also appeared as:
Variant Title: De Verborgen Foundation (1999)

I noticed the VTs for the second and third titles did not show a language and so clicked preparing to update those title records. I discovered that both of them were already recorded as Dutch editions. I then saw that both "Foundation's Fear" and "Foundation and Chaos" did not have a language set. I set both to English which corrected the display.

I suspect the current code has
if parent-title-language is-not-equal-to variant-title-language then show-variant-language
and this code fails if parent-title-language is null.

It looks like the display logic should have
set default-language="English"
if user-preferences-default-language is-not-null then set default-language=user-preferences-default-language
if parent-title-language is-null then set parent-title-language=default-language
if variant-title-language is-null then set variant-title-language=default-language
if parent-title-language is-not-equal-to variant-title-language then show-variant-language

[Ahasuerus]

Unfortunately, almost 60% of our titles still do not have language codes assigned. In many cases when a VT (not a translation, just a regular VT) has a language code assigned, its parent doesn't. In these types of cases, displaying the VT's language would be misleading since it would suggest that it's a translation.

[Ahasuerus]

Ticket moved from /p/isfdb/bugs/551/

[Ahasuerus]

Upon reflection I decided to change the logic to display VT languages if the parent has no language defined and the VT language is not English. The vast majority of our non-English titles have been entered since we added support for language codes, so it's highly likely that a non-English VT of a language-less parent is a translation.

[Ahasuerus]

Modified solution (see my comment above) implemented in biblio/common.py 1.113. Installed in r2015-046 on 2015-02-16.