How to model multilingual database with Zend, l18n mysql?

I know this topic was discusses a couple of times, but none of them represents the ultimate solution for me.

Situation I'm designing a relational mysql database which later should hold multilingual content. You know this from the Wikipedia or Microsoft Tech Support Pages. The contents should be the same for every language. e.g If translations are missing the site offers you the same content automatically translated or in the languages which the information is available in. If some values are not set, it should fallback to the second or default browser language or translate it e.g. through google. Development environment is Zend.

My ideas so far are for Solving the Problem:

Two Primary Keys: (ID, Language) Advantage: Easy Database Access through database abstraction layers. Problem: Foreign Keys, Relations ships, Fallbacks

Columns with 开发者_JAVA百科language suffix: Advantage: DB Performance, No relational Problems. Problem: Database abstraction layers cannot handle this?

Has any concept proven itself or is preferable over the other? Has anyone already created something like this and can share his experience with me? Does a modified Zend DB Controller exist for this situation? How do you link this information to a form?

Thank you for your help, hints and suggestions!

Kind regards,

Manuel

The second option would be not maintainable (this should be added on the minuses side). To actually add another language you'll need to modify table and abstraction layers. Sounds like a nightmare.

The first option seems much more promising but unfortunately there is a lot to do to make it work. However, from my experience this is rather typical solution, so I would not reinvent the wheel.
What I have to add is, language fallback should be done on the Zend side, database would miss some information. You may think of some kind of index table to hold information such as unique id of the contents and available languages. If you need to serve something, you would read such record, compare it against of Accept Languages and ask database again for valid contents (using the most suitable language). The only problem is, you would need to create such an index table somehow (the best way I see would be trigger on inserting contents to your content table).

A lot of work but the problem is not too easy.

I am working on the exact same problem right now.

Somehow it does not make sense to me to add everything into the same database. Lets say I want to go to the extreme and support some 50 languages this would just bloat my DB. So, I tend to keep my main DB in my main language and then introduce some Zend_Translate concept into it. Zend_Translate should give you the fallback solution you are looking for. While the main navigation and core design is not much of a problem for my web site my biggest concern right now is how to store all the main content and how to translate because these elements contain HTML among other things. For the main content I will probably use some alternate approach and use a separate DB with tables for each language.

My plattform will be a community driven database. So I actually gonna rely on humans translating it. You have to store the information anyways, so my first concern is not the database size or performance, but easy usability. So far my idea is to implement some structure as described above, not yet sure if i'll do it in doctrine or not.

Language decision: Start, application gets users preset language, secondary language, english mother-tong of the article. Fetching the article from the database I will check the following for every column: 1. is the primary language available? 2. Is the secondary language available? 3. If neither of them, display article in mother-tong or english and offer the user to translate it with suggestions from the google translate api. I guess it's gonna be quite a bit of coating and manipulating controllers or building a business model doing this.

@tawfekov is something like this or similar easily realizable with doctrine?