Need help with organizing MySQL data structures

Question

I have a multi-lingual site and we are having all of the text translated into 10 languages. We are going to have a session variable that sets a value for their country/language choice. I want to have all of our dealer contact information translated into the various languages, including country-specific alphabets like Japanese and Korean.

What I want to do is have some kind of lookup table that would dictate which language dealer information is chosen. In other words, I want the session variable to dictate which table the information is pulled from. So if the user chooses Korean and goes to the dealer pages, the page will be displayed in Korean. But if he chooses Japanese and goes to the same page, it will be in Japanese.

How do I structure my tables to do this? What will mysql query statements look like?

Answer 1

You're thinking about the problem on the wrong level. You'll have a list of strings indexed by number by language, incorporating them into the right places is the hard part, storing them is trivial. Thus asking about SQL is starting the game two steps ahead of yourself.

Look for internationalization documentation for your language and platform of choice.