Translations for non dynamic data

Question

I am currently making a web page with dynamic content from a database (a restaurant menu) storing item names, prices, yada yada. The restaurant usually caters to English and Japanese. I have stored the titles of the items in the database as English and Japanese, however when it comes to the type of the item, for example, Type: Drink, Type of Drink: Coffee I can obviously store the type of item alongside the item in the database, but it hardly seems worth it to store it twice as two different languages in the the database which would also make the form to add a new item a pain.

What is the best way to go about translating those little tiny pieces of information, like "Coffee", "Wine", "Click Here", "Menus", and using them on the page?

Answer 1

You can use gettext extension for translation static or predefined info on web page.

See manual http://php.net/manual/en/book.gettext.php

Example http://mel.melaxis.com/devblog/2005/08/06/localizing-php-web-sites-using-gettext/

Answer 2

I would store it in both languages, it makes the most sense to me. I don't see why you would go and do a request to your translation system each time you want to show any page in your menu.

If you are using an automatic translation system that you really trust, one thing that you could do is use it when adding a new item to make a suggestion. So, after the user enters the word in English on the form, automatically attempt to translate that into Japanese and put it in the Japanese field. If the user is satisfied with the translation, that's it for that task, otherwise he/she inputs with a better one.

Answer 3

if you are using any phph5 based framework , major framework have localization support like zend has Zend_Locale if you want your own translation dictionary , keep key value pair data in database table and memcached between application and DB , so static data will be cached for particular expiry time and data base load will be get decreased and fast retrieval of data