DB structure of a translation Web service

Rails
1

I am building a Web service that will provide content for different
client via Rest API.

currently I have: content has_many :keys (since many keys can
reference the same content)
content table has only one field - text
keys table has name and content_id

example for key: help_about
example for content: “This website is for blablabla…”

I want to add support for translations.
is it reasonable to store the content in separate table for each
language?
for example - content_english, content_spanish, etc.
If it is, how will rails handle it? currently Content.find 1 will
return the text of contents table.
and I will need to tell rails to grab it from content_english or
content_spanish.

btw, I looked at a gettext example and it uses only one table with
locale field to determine what language to show. but I am not sure
it’s a good solution for massive chunk of content and many languages.

Thanks!

2

HI oren,

There was recent similar discussion about design for content
translations and the answer I gave there may be useful to you:

I’m currently adding content translation to the Kete open source Rails
app (GitHub - kete/kete: Kete was developed by Horowhenua Library Trust and Katipo Communications Ltd. to build a digital library of Horowhenua material. and http://kete.net.nz). You may
find some example code there useful.

A lot of people, including myself with
GitHub - kete/mongo_translatable: Rails specific I18n model localization, ala Globalize2, backed by MongoDB rather than an RDBMS. May include UI elements, too., are starting to use a NoSQL
backend for translation. The latest I18n gem just added Tokyo Cabinet
support, too.

Hope this helps,
Walter

3

Thanks Walter.
Kete looks like an awesome project.

It looks like the simplest solution for me would be to add language_id
field to my content table and maybe later on
I’ll refactor it to other solution. mongo db sounds awesome, but I am
not sure where to start - the github page doesn’t explain about
installing/using it.

4

Thanks Walter.
Kete looks like an awesome project.

It looks like the simplest solution for me would be to add language_id
field to my content table and maybe later on
I’ll refactor it to other solution. mongo db sounds awesome, but I am
not sure where to start - the github page doesn’t explain about
installing/using it.

5

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 3:06 AM, oren [email protected] wrote:

Thanks Walter.
Kete looks like an awesome project.

Thanks. It’s been good to work on and useful.

It looks like the simplest solution for me would be to add language_id
field to my content table and maybe later on
I’ll refactor it to other solution.

I usually store locale in the table for the content without splitting
out to a languages (or locales) table and storing a locale_id. Rails
only stores i18n.locale as a symbol. I haven’t had a need for tighter
constraints on the data for locale than that.

mongo db sounds awesome, but I am
not sure where to start - the github page doesn’t explain about
installing/using it.

Yep, that’s in the works. In the meantime, check out

which is a full (but simple) Rail 2.3.5 app for testing purposes. You
can dig around there, including the tests, to see the basics about how
to mongo_translatable works. I’ll get to the README before too long.

Cheers,
Walter