Question

I have created a website in Symfony2 using website.com/_locale/xxxxxxxx routing to translate static data into two languages. This implementation works successfully but I wish to go further than that. I want to run this website for several other countries and a proper transformation is necessary in order to have those countries (with different languages) managed into one website.

Let’s say I have an entity for Shops. Each object created has some variables like Address, kind of business, equipment etc. This allows the user to create an entry in his own language but all entries will be mixed in the table. The table will have italian, english, spanish data and when someone enters the website from a different location, we unfortunately have to view the other language’s data.

I want the user to have the ability to create a new Shop in two languages: English and his own. The solutions I have thought of are:

• I will create a new column in the same table for example “original_language” and every entry will be stored with a locale: en_US, es_SP etc. When the website wants to retrieve a row will search through ONE table will thousands of entries.
• I will create another table which will be the mirror of the original one, in another language. This means that I will have a Shops table/entity, a Shops_it, a Shops_es, a Shops_br etc. Unfortunately this solution will need me to create several tables and relationships between other linked tables.
• I will create another column in the same row for each field. The Shops.description, Shops.address etc. will also include Shops.description_en, Shops.description_br, Shops.address_en, Shops.address_br etc.

What is the safest, quickest and more professional way to do what I want?

Answer 1

Either use the [DoctrineExtensions][1] lib to get your columns translated (it uses an EAV-alike structure for translations) or write 1-n relations for translated entities, having a “base” entity and a “translated” one. You can use the indexBy attribute of collections to make fetching and logic easier to handle.