Languages and translations

All documents created in UiTdatabank are available in Dutch (NL). Besides Dutch, content editors can use UiTdatabank to translate the name and description of their documents in French (FR), German (DE) and English (EN). The API supports translations in every two-letter language ISO 639-1 code

To limit your results to documents that have translations for name and description in a specific language, you can use the languages URL parameter, or the languages field in advanced queries.

Allowed values for both are any of the two-letter language ISO 639-1 codes, but the most used languages are:

• nl (or NL)
• fr (or FR)
• de (or DE)
• en (or EN)

Url parameter

An example to get results that have a French translation for the name and/or description:

GET https://search.uitdatabank.be/offers/?languages[]=fr

You can repeat this parameter to filter by multiple languages (note that this uses the AND operator, so you will only get results that have translations for both languages in the name and/or description field).

GET https://search.uitdatabank.be/offers/?languages[]=fr&languages[]=de

Advanced queries

Using the q parameter, you can execute more advanced queries than by using the languages URL parameter.

For example:

GET https://search.uitdatabank.be/offers/?q=languages:fr OR languages:de

Note that while you can combine this with free text search, you will probably not get the intended results:

GET https://search.uitdatabank.be/offers/?q=languages:en AND the worst band ever

In the example above we’re filtering documents to only search through those that have an EN translation and one or more matches with the words “the worst band ever”. However, the word “worst” is also a Dutch word, and while we filtered the documents to only return results that have an English translation, the free text search will still look for text matches in all available languages on those (filtered) documents. So we might have an event that includes the word “worst” in Dutch and that also has an English translation, and it would be a valid result.

To fix this, you should use the textLanguage parameter as described in the free text search documentation.

Incomplete translations

Using either the URL parameter or advanced queries to filter by language(s), you might still get results that only have partial translations. This is because as soon as a single field (name or description) is translated to a specific language, the whole document is considered to have a translation in that specific language (albeit an incomplete one).

If you require specific fields to be translated, you can search for those documents by using advanced queries to check for the existence of a field translation:

GET https://search.uitdatabank.be/offers/?q=_exists_:name.fr AND _exists_:description.fr

The example above will filter out any documents that do not have both their name and description translated to French.

The same way, you can also search for documents that are missing translations for specific fields:

GET https://search.uitdatabank.be/offers/?q=!(_exists_:name.fr) OR !(_exists_:description.fr)

This will return all documents that are missing French translations for either name and/or description.

Alternatively, you use the completedLanguages URL parameter (and field in advanced queries) to only look for documents that are fully translated (both name and description) to a specific language.

GET https://search.uitdatabank.be/offers/?completedLanguages[]=fr

GET https://search.uitdatabank.be/offers/?q=completedLanguages:fr OR completedLanguages:de

Note that if an optional field is left empty in all languages, a translation can still be considered to be complete if all other fields that have a value are translated.

Main Language

Traditionally, each document created in UiTdatabank starts as Dutch and can then be translated to other languages. However, in the future the main language of a document might become configurable. To accommodate this, each document already has a mainLanguage property on which you can also search in the Search API.

For example:

GET https://search.uitdatabank.be/offers/?mainLanguage=nl

Or using advanced queries:

GET https://search.uitdatabank.be/offers/?q=mainLanguage:nl

Organizer name

It is possible to translate the name of an organizer. See advanced queries for exact parameter.

Address

It is possible to translate the different address fields of a place. See advanced query documentation in address for the exact search parameters.