Most journal publishers do not publish multilingual articles, most journal articles are not multilingual, and most JATS users have not been uncomfortable because JATS did not accommodate multilingual articles. It was important that, in adding a mechanism to enable a small but growing community to use JATS, we not impose a burden on established users. (The JATS Standing Committee was told, in no uncertain terms, that “NOBODY NEEDS THAT #*($!”. We interpreted that to mean that the speaker didn't need it, wasn't interested in people who might need it, and was concerned about the burden that might be imposed on existing users if it were added.)

It was the hope of the JATS Standing Committee that the JATS multi-language mechanism be neither bulky nor intrusive. Ideally, any mechanism should enable users to create true multilingual documents while not requiring changes to the tagging of mono-lingual documents. Ideally, any multi-language mechanisms should be completely ignorable by creators/users of mono-lingual documents. In other words, if you do not publish multilingual documents, nothing in your JATS-world should change.

The JATS 1.4 multi-language structures were designed to be TOTALLY IGNORABLE. Users who have no need for multiple languages in one document can simply not use any of them. Some users make their own subsets of the JATS model that do not include any of these attributes. They can continue to do so and to leave the multi-language structures out of their working versions. Documents that are valid to such a subset will be valid to the published models and will be indistinguishable from documents that were created using the whole model that happen not to use the Multi-Language structures. [[JATSMLExamples]]

Further, it is highly unlikely that any user will ever use all of the multi-language attributes at all, and never within a single article (with the possible exception of articles created to demonstrate use of the mechanism). The multi-language attributes can and should be used only when appropriate and useful, and when the information is available. A user should use the multi-language attributes, like everything else in JATS, to encode information that they desire to provide to users of the articles. There is no virtue, and significant cost, in encoding information in the XML that is unimportant, redundant, or of questionable accuracy. In other words, if:

don't clutter your XML. The multi-language mechanism is a tool for communicating multilingual information that matters rather than a requirement that creators fill their documents with guesses or information that is irrelevant to the intended use/users of the articles. [[JATSMLExamples]]