Question

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Create a webpage with Multilanguage in PHP
PHP – how to translate a website into multiple languages?

I want to make a site which will have 3 languages – e.g. English, Arabic and Italian;
the content sure will be different from one language to another.

Should I make different table for each language, e.g.:

en_articles
ar_articles
it_articles

each with the same article in different language,

or make one table articles like this:

article_id
article_en_title
article_ar_title
article_it_title

Please advise me.

Answer 1

If you are very sure that you are going to work only with 3 languages, the best option is to use one table, with three columns, one for language:

article_id
article_en_title
article_ar_title
article_it_title

If eventually you need to add other language, only add other column.

If you think that you are going to add other languages, o you want to use the code for others web with differents languages, I think that the best solution is to use 3 tables, one for the languages, one for the articles and other table for relation them

table “languages”

language_iso
language_name

table “articles”

article_id
article_name (Internal name for the article)

table “articles_x_languages”

article_id
language_iso
article_title
article_text

I’m assuming that you are going to have each article in the three languages. Example:

Languages
language_iso | language_name
          en | English
          ar | Arabic
          it | Italian

Articles
article_id | article_name
         1 | Sample 1
         2 | Sample 2

Articles_x_languages
article_id | language_iso | article_title | article_text
         1 |           en | english title | Lorem ipsum ..
         1 |           ar |  arabic title | Lorem ipsum ..
         1 |           it | italian title | Lorem ipsum ..
         2 |           en | english title | Lorem ipsum ..
         2 |           ar |  arabic title | Lorem ipsum ..
         2 |           it | italian title | Lorem ipsum ..