David,
As you are no doubt well aware, there are many moving parts in clinical knowledge governance. The processes built into CKM are designed to support this. It is phenomenally complex and every time we solved one issue we discovered 10 more. Devising a process in which content publication was managed at the same time as technical versioning, plus add in the potential for simultaneous management of translation and terminology reviews… this is just the tip of the governance iceberg and it gets mighty convoluted real fast.
So the pragmatic decision is that the language of primacy in the international CKM is English, as is the UI etc. If we didn’t it would be like the Tower of Babel - multiple archetypes with multiple original languages and utter chaos. There would be even more complaints about how complex it is. Little do they know how much worse it could be.
The original language of the archetype is the one sent out for content peer review. It is also the one that is published. Other translations are intended to be relative to the original language and that’s why we are constantly advising people that translating the archetype prior to publication may require multiple re-translations as the content of the archetypes evolve through the publication process.
In the Norwegian CKM, the original language and language for review is set to Norwegian, for obvious reasons. So the capacity for multilingual CKMs is there, just like in the archetypes. The original language for a CKM is a setting.
If there was a Spanish CKM, the CKM tool can integrate a Spanish translation of the UI display and the archetypes could all be displayed in Spanish - a coherent and consistent tool for use by Spanish speakers, including archetypes with all variations of Spanish. If you ran a review it would be conducted in the ‘original language’ for the CKM and it would be the Spanish content version that would be published. The English translation of that same archetypes would be just a draft until a specific English translation review deemed it fit for publication in English. The same applies to any/all Spanish language variants.
For practical clinical governance purposes, we had to anchor one of the many moving parts. This is a significant one but it doesn’t prevent other CKMs from doing a similar thing in other languages, nor those archetypes being shared across multiple language CKMs.
Until we solve the issue of the multilingual federation of CKMs, which is still some way off (if ever), sharing archetypes between different language CKMs is absolutely possible, but it is the result of a deliberate strategy between Clinical Knowledge Administrators to collaborate with each other. This works well at present between the International CKM and the Norwegian CKM - @siljelb and her team are expert at managing the translations and their review of Norwegian translation in their CKM whilst the international community reviews the same one in English. The archetypes in the 2 CKMs are very closely aligned specifically because we choose to work in a way that prioritises convergence of the archetypes towards a coherent and shared library. This is the bit where people make active choices and the tooling is… well, just a tool.
Hope this helps provide context.
Best regards
Heather