cakephp multilingual dynamic content from database - php

Question

I want to develop website with option to select language
at the time I do not know about how to structure my database tables i.e
either I should add separate fields for each language e.g
tbl_posts
id, title_en,title_fr,description_en,description_fr,....
or should I get help of google translate at run time
or there is something else easy to do this
secondly I will need to have URLs like
www.domain.com/en/posts/ & www.domain.com/fr/posts/
third what other things should I keep in mind to develop multilingual website.
looking for standardized, more optimized, easy manageable and fully dynamic solution.

Answer 1

Cakephp
Step 1: In your lib/Cake/basic.php add function
if (!function_exists('__dbt')) {
function __dbt($text, $args = null) {
if($text==null){
return null;
}else{
$languageUse = Configure::read('Config.language');
if($languageUse!='en-us' && $languageUse!='eng'){
$modelName = ucfirst($languageUse)."Translation";
$model = ClassRegistry::init($modelName);
$data = $model->find('first',array('fields'=>array('translation'),'conditions'=>array("text"=>"$text")));
if(!empty($data[$modelName]) && $data[$modelName]['translation']!=''){
return $data[$modelName]['translation'];//die('1');
}else{
// Please copy & paste below code from your basic.php __() function
App::uses('I18n', 'I18n');
$translated = I18n::translate($text);
$arguments = func_get_args();
return I18n::insertArgs($translated, array_slice($arguments, 1));
}
}else{
// Please copy & paste below code from your basic.php __() function
App::uses('I18n', 'I18n');
$translated = I18n::translate($text);
$arguments = func_get_args();
return I18n::insertArgs($translated, array_slice($arguments, 1));
}
}
}
}
Step 2: create table on basis of language you want to use
Note: table name should be prefix locale + _tranlations
example: hin_translations, tha_translations etc.
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `hin_translations` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`text` text NOT NULL,
`translation` text NOT NULL,
`created` datetime NOT NULL,
`modified` datetime NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
In above table add english string in your text column and its translation in translation column.
Step 3: where ever you want to change language string either from database or locale po file just use
__dbt("Write your string here");
:) enjoy your multilingual site