multilanguage e-shop, the store name and address

[searain]

I am building up a multi-language e-shop. I want the design to be general purpose, such as it could be for English, Spanish, and Chinese. But now my project is for English/Spanish.

Such as for products, I will have two tables to hold the products information in database.

"products" - which will hold the price, products_code etc. which is universal for all languages.

"products_description"- which will hold the products name, products description etc. which is for individual languages.

These two tables will linked by products_id field.

So far, no problem.

But now I am also going to set up service_centers table for this multi-language site.

By the same token,

I set up two tables to hold the stores information

stores: which is universal for all languages.

stores_description: which is individual for each language.

these two tables linked by stores_id.

OK. so far.

My question is

For the fields such as

address, city, state fields should I put it in the "stores" table and make it universal to all the languages. or should I put it the "stores_description" to make the merchant fill in for each language.

Say for a English/Spanish web sites, the address, city, state information of a store is different or the same?

Or for the phone_number, web_address, the commone sense is they belong to "store" table and it is universal for all languages. But will that be the case, merchant want to give different web address in different language cases. Or if they want add some free text such as extension to the phone number, and then it seems phone number should belong to "stores_description" table and the merchant have to fill the information each time for each languge?

[dream_scape]

Say for a English/Spanish web sites, the address, city, state information of a store is different or the same?

If you are talking about a single store then it is the same for all locations. You would not send something to Spain and write out the address as the english translation, would you? I mean, I doubt it would find its way very well. This is different with languages that use non alpha characters, in which case the alpha equivalent (such as PinYin for chinese) is often used for international mailing instead of characters (but within the country the characters would be used)

If it is an international site, then you should set the address up in international format, which would be the same for all languages. Each country has their own international guidelines, but they are mostly about the same. This page has a good overview of different country formats: http://www.bitboost.com/ref/international-address-formats.html