Dynamic multilingual content

[smadaboosi]

I have a web site that is run on Apache using PHP/MySQL the content of for the site is database driven. Now I want the capability to add the display of the site in say Russian, how can I do this without changing much to the data or the template. The site is updated using a backend CMS script. All content is entered in English. Once entered the site visitor should have hte option to view the site either in english or in Russian. You help is greatly appreciated.

Thank you

[Chrisskidmore]

Unless you want to use a service similar to babelfish with computer generated translations (which I would avoid) then you have to have the Russian in the database as well!

A simple way is a table such as :

lang_ID (primary)
language (primary)
lang_text

The query is something like
select lang_text from table where lang_id = ?? and language = ??"

echo the result of that query to the page.

hope that helps

[smadaboosi]

I have been researching on babelfish and there was another one for a fee. For some reason babelfish is not able to translate dynamically generated pages. Or probably I'm not trying it correctly. Has anyone who has implemented babelfish guide me. Also, with storing the Russian page also in the database, means that I will have to enter the content to my page twice right?

Or is there a way to have the page content entered once through the content manager script and run it trough a translator and save it translated into the database. This will save a lot of effort right. In such a scenario are there dictionaries available th

Thank you for your help.

Sesh

[dave420]

The secret to this method is the database, and a small library of code:

The database needs a table, say "babel", that holds in it each translation for each language you're using. The table has 4 fields - transID, transKey, languageID, translation.

In the database, there should be a line for each bit of text in each language:

1 "This is some text" 1 "This is some text"
2 "This is some text" 2 "This is some text in Russian"

In this example, I've used the english text (or first 255 chars of) as the transKey - this is to make calls to the translations much easier.

Once you have all your translations in the database, you need a function to get them out. All you need to pass to this function is the language you want, and the key you have (first bit of English translation). The function does a simple search on the database for the corresponding text in the language specified.

Of course, hitting your database for each translation is not the ideal solution. If your site is big enough, and your skills suitably advanced, you can write a decent caching mechanism for this system, so you can benefit from improved speed while still keeping your translations based in the database.

I've used this system on large databases, and it's great 🙂