mlang tags - Do they work in Scales?

mlang tags - Do they work in Scales?

by Jacques LeCavalier -
Number of replies: 3

Hi, there.

Much of our training is bilingual, with courses delivered in both French and English at once. We use "mlang" tags in almost all Moodle activities and resources, but have noticed that the tags do not work in every Moodle component. For example, some Quiz question types do not support mlang tags.

My question has to do with Scales. Does anyone know if mlang tags are supported in the description of scale values? For example, in the scale shown below, would mlang tags work, or do we have to keep putting both French and English scale value descriptions?

Billingual scale

Thanks for your help.
Jacques

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In reply to Jacques LeCavalier

Re: mlang tags - Do they work in Scales?

by Marcus Green -
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Which question types have you found that do not work with mlang tags. I am a question type developer (Gapfill and Wordselect) and always interested in other types.
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In reply to Marcus Green

Re: mlang tags - Do they work in Scales?

by Jacques LeCavalier -
Hi, Marcus.
In the "Drag and drop onto markers" type, the text for Markers does not seem to support mlang tags, although the other question components do.
In the Short answer question type, the Answers do not appear to support mlang tags.
In Gapfill, mlang tags do not seem to work inside the square brackets where correct answers are.
There is almost surely a technical reason why these particular elements are that way, but it does require a workaround when these question types are used. For our part, we tend to avoid question types that do not completely support mlang tags, but sometimes we don't have a choice.
Jacques
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In reply to Jacques LeCavalier

Re: mlang tags - Do they work in Scales?

by Marcus Green -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
"In Gapfill, mlang tags do not seem to work inside the square brackets where correct answers are."

I can think of two reasons why MLang wouldn't work in the Gapfill gaps. One is technical in that it strips any tags by default because the answers are standard HTML text boxes which will only show text and will not render any html.

The other is logical in that the gaps represent the answers. so if you had a gap with the word cat [cat] and a french person saw [chat] (French for cat), the string "chat" would be compared with the correct answer cat and found to be incorrect. When using Gapfill mode (type into the box), it would be possible to offer different language versions, i.e. [cat|chat] would cater for a French and English example, and I have tested that the body of the question will process both MLang and MLang2 tags. 

However anything to do with Translation is fraught because sentence structure can mean a gap would need to appear at a different point in the text, though it's not an issue in this example (courtesy of Google translate)

Le [cat|chat] s'est assis sur le tapis


I strongly suspect this logic applies to the core short answer question type. I had assumed you were referring to support within the body of question text rather than within the answer.
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