Background
For more than two decades, Folknaptár has been one of the most important sources of information for the Hungarian folk dance and táncház community. It grew out of the Folkrádió community portal in 2002, and since July 2024 it has been operated by Hungarian Heritage House. Integral Vision's task was to turn this community knowledge base, built largely on volunteer work, into a modern, institution-grade platform. The platform had to serve three groups at once: visitors, the organisers who submit events, and the editors who curate the content.
The Solution
Today Folknaptár is the most complete collection of events related to Hungarian folk culture. It covers both the Carpathian Basin and the Hungarian diaspora, from Budapest through Cluj-Napoca and Vienna to New York, San Diego and Melbourne. The system holds more than 36,000 events, including the full 24-year archive migrated from the previous system.
At the heart of the platform is a complex, Drupal-based event management workflow and administration system. It lets registered organisers submit events efficiently and in large volumes, and it lets editors publish reviewed content of consistent quality. Numerous automations support this work in the background. For example, they handle recurring and multi-day events and standardise venue and location data.
Visitors can browse events in calendar, list and map views. Alongside free-text search, they can filter by country, by town, and by a detailed two-level category system. The categories range from táncház and folk pub evenings through courses, exhibitions and stage performances to camps and media content. In a typical autumn month, the monthly view shows close to 300 events. The archive also makes the past quarter-century of the Hungarian folk revival movement searchable. The Folkrádió player and other Hungarian Heritage House digital services are built into the interface. Thematic landing pages, such as the Summer Camps collection, support seasonal campaigns.
AI Integration: Building an International Database of Hungarian Folk Events
The English-language version of Folknaptár is now live. It is based on a translation pipeline built on Anthropic's Claude, integrated into the Drupal platform via the Claude API, which translated the entire 24-year archive, a total of 36,267 folk events.
Translation was not a one-off operation. We built it as a continuously running, scheduled system. A Claude-powered agent monitors new Hungarian content added to the system and translates it automatically within one hour. As a result, the Hungarian and English versions stay virtually in step with each other, and bilingual publishing creates no extra work for the editors.
Transparency was a key priority. Every machine-translated item carries a clearly visible notice: "This content was translated using AI."
The outcome goes beyond a second language version. Folknaptár has become an internationally citable and searchable database of Hungarian folk events. It makes both the living present and the rich history of Hungarian folklore accessible to international audiences, researchers and the diaspora.
Results at a Glance
Folknaptár now holds more than 72,000 event entries in Hungarian and English, drawn from around 40 countries and covering a 24-year archive. New content appears in both languages within one hour.