Question

What is the best way to create multi-language database? To create localized table for every table is making design and querying complex, in other case to add column for each language is simple but not dynamic, please help me to understand what is the best choose for enterprise applications

Answer 1

What we do, is to create two tables for each multilingual object.

E.g. the first table contains only language-neutral data (primary key, etc.) and the second table contains one record per language, containing the localized data plus the ISO code of the language.

In some cases we add a DefaultLanguage field, so that we can fall-back to that language if no localized data is available for a specified language.

Example:

Table "Product":
----------------
ID                 : int
<any other language-neutral fields>


Table "ProductTranslations"
---------------------------
ID                 : int      (foreign key referencing the Product)
Language           : varchar  (e.g. "en-US", "de-CH")
IsDefault          : bit
ProductDescription : nvarchar
<any other localized data>

With this approach, you can handle as many languages as needed (without having to add additional fields for each new language).

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Update (2014-12-14): please have a look at this answer, for some additional information about the implementation used to load multilingual data into an application.