About Europeana.eu
Europeana.eu is a one stop shop to discover Europe’s digital cultural heritage. It provides cultural heritage professionals, researchers, teachers and enthusiasts with access to over 60 million items from over 3,500 data providers across Europe. The website showcases art, books, films and music on a wide range of themes including newspapers, archaeology, fashion, science, sport and much more.
The content found on Europeana.eu is reused in increasingly creative ways to inspire and inform fresh perspectives and open conversations about our history and culture; whether it’s teachers developing resources for lessons, developers using our open-source API to make games, or culture lovers creating gifs and telling stories.
About multilingual search
Website visitors have growing needs and expectations for accessing material in alternative languages, and this is especially true for Europeana.eu, which gives access to data from over 3,500 providers from 45 countries. In terms of search experience, this means that the results of a query entered in one language should give access to collections that have been described with those query terms in other languages.
Our approach is based on using English as a ‘pivot language’: users’ queries are automatically translated to English, and compared with translations of objects’ metadata in the same language (some automatically produced, some resulting from multilingual expert vocabularies used in cultural heritage) to give users a wider range of results.
After an experimentation phase to ensure that this process did not result in too much ‘noise’, this feature was deployed for the Spanish language version of Europeana.eu. If someone searches ‘house’ in English, or ‘casa’ in Spanish, they receive relevant results regardless of the language of the metadata.
Rolling out multilingual search to more languages
To allow us to learn and adjust as we go, we concluded that a phased rolling out of the multilingual search feature to new languages allows us to better monitor the evolving usage and offer opportunities to gather more granular feedback from selected audiences. We have now started to roll out multilingual search to more official EU languages, in order to serve a larger base of visitors.
Following the experimental deployment for Spanish, the first three languages to be rolled out are Polish, Romanian and Hungarian. It’s now possible to search Europeana.eu in these languages and receive relevant results from across Europe’s languages.
How to use multilingual search on Europeana.eu
The multilingual search feature can only be activated by visitors who have an account and are logged in to Europeana.eu - sign up now. By creating an account, not only will you be able to search Europeana.eu in your language, receiving relevant results from across Europe’s languages, you can also like items and create public and private galleries. It’s quick, easy and free to sign up, and once you do so, you’ll be able to start searching in your language.
The multilingual search feature is not enabled by default. A front-end interaction component allows you to switch this feature on or off depending on your preference. If you don’t want search results from different languages or if search results surfaced by automatic translation from different languages don't meet your needs, you can just keep to the default.
Further roll outs will continue from the summer and will be announced on our social media - make sure you follow us on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook. In the meantime, we welcome your feedback on this feature by using the feedback button when using Europeana.eu.