Dealing with multilingualism and non-English content in open repositories: Challenges and perspectives

Several organizations and initiatives have recently called for more support of multilingualism in research to promote epistemic plurality and raise awareness of the adverse effects of an anglocentric research ecosystem. But this support for and practice of multilingualism and linguistic diversity cannot happen in a digital or technological vacuum. Open repositories can play an important role in ensuring that research infrastructures have the ability to implement and promote multilingualism at scale in an Open Science environment. This implementation, however, is complex and does not come without its own theoretical and technical challenges. One of these challenges is to recognize that the implementation of multilingualism in open repositories can hardly be dissociated from wider concerns of discoverability, research assessment practices, and the anglocentric nature of digital infrastructures and metadata standards or protocols. Drawing on the COAR (Coalition of Open Access Repositories) recommendations report produced by the COAR Task Force on Supporting Multilingualism and non-English Content in Repositories, this article presents and critically examines how and why three particular recommendations of this document are particularly well suited to support a decolonial trajectory for the management of multilingualism in open repositories. More specifically, this article discusses the decolonial aspects and praxis underlying guidelines such as declaring the language(s) of the resource and of its metadata, writing personal name/s using the writing system used in the deposited document while providing a persistent identifier to disambiguate author/s identification and, overlapping with the latter, enabling UTF-8 support so as to promote use of the original alphabet / the writing system whenever possible, without negating the possibility to transliterate metadata by means of recognized standards (e.g. ISO). In so doing, we argue that these recommendations enable a multifaceted technology and politics of recovery that promotes a form of linguistic revitalization and strengthens linguistic diversity.