How to store multi-lingual website information in database?

Question

I'm currently creating a multi-lingual website, and I have different types of words that are being translated all across the website. However, whats the best practice when it comes to storing this in the database? This is what I currently do:

I have the language Norwegian and English.

My database looks like this:

Whenever I add a new language it get added into the languages table like this:

At the same time a new table will be created with looking like this language_en. Using the value in language_val.

Later on I use URL routing to retrieve en, no or whatever language and fetch the website information from the correct table.

My question is, should I rather have only 1 table and use the language_id in this one? or is it perfectly fine to split up languages into multiple tables?

Each language table would look just like this:

Don't know; I don't write PHP. Did you tag your question? Sorry I see that you did now. I missed it. — duffymo
– duffymo, Commented Feb 16, 2016 at 14:56

Dave · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-16 14:55:20Z

1

With Silverlight (and later with PHP) I've done this by putting the language's in the same table, this worked fine and was user friendly (easy to edit). Only when retrieving data you should off course only select the language you need.

answered Feb 16, 2016 at 14:55

Dave

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2 Comments

Gjert Over a year ago

Is this faster than using separate tables? let's say I have 10 languages, each language has 1000 things to translate?

Dave Over a year ago

You should go for as few as possible tables in this case (normalization, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization) this will improve insight and makes your code more manageable aswell.

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