.NET Localization: Manual Translation or Character Encoding

Question

I am working on a project that requires localization of all user-facing text in the database. Thus, for a business object there are usually three tables involved:

• EntityBase - Holds core attributes
• EntityLocalized - Holds localizable attributes and related culture
• Cultures - Holds list of acceptable cultures

I use a view for every entity to join Base and Localized together to produce a result set of all possible combinations for easy querying.

I am having some trouble creating the UI to make this easy for Administrators to use with different languages. I am modeling a Parent -> Child -> Child relationship so the form is getting pretty big in terms of markup.

How well does just changing the character encoding for the page work? Does it translate well or am I better off biting the bullet and using the current model I have for localization?

Answer 1

I decided to bite the bullet but I chose a different way of showing it in the UI. I realized translating the entities is a separate process than creating them. So instead, I will let the Admin translate the entities in a modal dialog box, traversing the relationships and changing languages.