Managing Foreign Languages in a Database

Add a Comment

3 Comments

Comment by Dayo Atewologun on August 15, 2009 at 11:46pm

Hi,
Just going through barry's comment of January 30, 2009 at 10:53pm on foreign language issue, this has been my passion recently and am very much interested in the topic. I have visualised - even attempted - scenerio where all texts such as error messages, msgbox etc are stored in different tables for different languages.

The users choice when loging on will then determine the table that will be used to populate various forms and user messages the in programme e.g you can have TB_ENG, TB_FR, TB_RUS etc.......????, I hope to get somewhere now with the group's support
Dayo

Comment by Satoshi Nagara on August 10, 2009 at 8:39pm

Depending upon where I ask there seems to be some disagreement over what standard of unicode works best, especially for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) deployments. Programmers and dbase pros like UTF-8, some portion of CJK cultural professionals have a strong preference for UTF-16. Does anyone use UTF-32?

Now, I have heard from a few in the Islamic studies community and even some in the accented alphabet community (and of course cyrillic) who have similar beefs between different unicode encodings.

So, what is meant by UNICODE, in this case?

By the way, great idea having a group about the language issue. It's a thorny but rich issue, once you open it up.

Comment by Barry on January 30, 2009 at 10:53pm

The preferred_language field for a User in the Database would be used to record the language of each person.

UNICODE would be used to correctly store different characters sets, such as Japanese,French or Hungarian

This is done when you set up the Database, but it does not affect the design of the Database.

Multiple languages are commonly used for Multi-national Corporations, such as IBM, wherre they need to store the description of the same Product in many different languages. In this case there would be a language field in every table that stores text that must be displayed in the langauge suitable for the country (or the preferred language for a User in your case).

There may not be any text of this nature that must be displayed in different languages.

There may be messages that the application will display to the User.

In other words, they exist in the interface between the application and the User.

For example, "Welcome" would be ようこそ in Japanese.

We may need to enhance the Database design to accomodate foreign lannguages.

If so, we would need to store these in different languages and use the ones that correspond to the User's Preferred Language.

What do other people think ?