Question

I have data in different languages inserted into my db, such as chinese, french, english, malay, japanese, korean, etc.

How can I detect those languages and query the specific one. For example if I only want to query data in chinese and display it to users.

Answer 1

If I were you, I’d have something like this to store the text that is displayed in your UI controls:

create table ui_labels (
  control_id int,
  language varchar(2),
  label varchar(500),
  primary key (control_id, language)
);

There will be one unique control_id for each control (e.g. button) in your UI. Each control can have many labels, one for each language.

Then, each UI control can have a different label for each language. (I’m assuming a two-letter ISO language code here, but you could also use a numeric ID or some other identification scheme.)

This makes it easy to add new languages just by adding rows to the ui_labels table, and easy to switch the language displayed in the UI just by switching the language value that you use in your queries.

The data for a button could look like this:

insert into ui_labels (control_id, language, label)
  values (1, 'en', 'Read the article');
insert into ui_labels (control_id, language, label)
  values (1, 'es', 'Leer el artículo');
insert into ui_labels (control_id, language, label)
  values (1, 'tl', 'Bumasa ang balita');

As an alternative to this approach, though, you may want to look into gettext, which is a standard way to do translation in PHP. It doesn’t use your database. If it’s a requirement to put the strings in the database (for example, if an end-user has to be able to edit them), then this isn’t an option, but it may be something that you can consider. If you are interested in this, you might want to have a look at this blog post:

http://verens.com/2008/04/03/translation-in-php/