Re: Internationalization

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Thank you Sam for the valuable input!

Best regards,

Pedro Doria Meunier
GSM: +351 96 17 20 188
Skype: pdoriam

Sam Mason wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 02:47:53AM +0100, Pedro Doria Meunier wrote:
>> Actually what I have is a fully internationalized site by means of
>> getttext.
>> *Some* of the content comes from the PGSQL database where 2 tables
>> relation with others (namely for sensor data description).
>
> Why not continue using gettext?
>
>> These tables have the simplest arrangement: id, description :]
>>
>> I wondered if there was some sort of pgsql extension providing a text
>> replacement mechanism of sorts in order to achieve something like
>> gettext ...
>
> As with any specialised problem, PG doesn't solve it directly but
> provides various tools for you to solve it in which ever way is best for
> you.
>
>> I guess I'll have to resort to what I've previously thought of ...
>
> If, by this, you mean having a column for each language, I'd recommend
> against doing this. Normalisation is normally the thing to aim for in
> databases, so something like:
>
> CREATE TABLE descriptions (
> id INTEGER,
> lang TEXT,
> PRIMARY KEY (id,lang)
> description TEXT
> );
>
> would generally be considered better. The reason being that this way
> you don't need to change the database every time somebody wants to
> translate the software into a new language. If you wanted to maintain
> compatibility with the rest of the existing code, you could create a
> view like:
>
> CREATE VIEW descriptions AS
> SELECT id, description
> FROM descriptions
> WHERE lang = 'en';
>
> Or whatever language your messages are already in and call the table
> above something else. Your code can carry on thinking there's a
> "descriptions" table (or whatever you call the view) and doesn't need to
> know that there are other languages available. You can then slowly move
> the code across to the new version of the table and get rid of the view
> when you're done.
>
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