On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:34:56 +0000 Miguel Vaz said:
> Hi,
>
> This is my first post, and could use some points of view on the subject.
> Have a project that will have several languages for its records, for places,
> for example, whose names and descriptions will be in 3 languages.
>
> Have already read several sites about it but always end up with several
> perspectives:
>
> 1 - Tables for each language: places_pt, places_en, places_es, with fields:
> id, name, description; Seems superfluous, but will leave less records on
> each table, although adding a great amount of tables, the more languages i
> have;
>
> 2 - Rows for each language: id, lang, name, description - the field "lang"
> will have "pt", "en" or "es", and when displaying, i will have to lookup the
> active language and get the proper record; Will add tremendously to the
> record #;
>
> 3 - Fields for each language: table "places", with fields: id, name_pt,
> name_en, name_es, description_pt,description_en,description_es - not likely
> to add a new language, but still adding new field adds complexity.
>
> Is there a "proper" way to do things? Any usual way of handling several
> languages on a project? Any help is highly appreciated, thanks.
>
> MV
Back when I internationalized my site, I used a table thus:
| locale | varchar(5) | NO | PRI | en | |
| strid | varchar(127) | NO | PRI | | |
| strval | tinyblob | YES | | NULL | |
+--------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
and populated it w/ the english phrases first:
('en', 'Country', 'Country')
('en', 'Total', 'Total')
('en', 'Day', 'Day')
... etc.
Then I added different languages:
('de', 'Country', 'Land')
('de', 'Total', 'Summen')
('de', 'Day', 'Tag') ...
When the user logs in, it scans all the 'en' (english) tokens and stores
it in a PHP array('Day' => 'Day', 'Total' => 'Total' ...
Once you figure out the user's locale (either from a user table or
parsing the http headers) you re-scan using the proper locale,
modifying the array as necessary: 'Day' => 'Tag', 'Total' =>
'Summen' ...
That way if you don't know or haven't yet found the proper translation
for a phrase it will default to the english language.
* Note the locale field is varchar(5).
There is a de, a de_DE, and a de_CH locale!
Have fun!
--
Don Read [email protected]
It's always darkest before the dawn. So if you are going to
steal the neighbor's newspaper, that's the time to do it.
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