Multi language database, with default fallback

Question

I have a question that, I know, has been widely discussed about, but in my opinion, there is one aspect that still needs clarification.

I am creating a web-application w

Answer 1

Using common shared table for all translatable fields of all tables

In the above approach the translation table is an extension of the parent table. Hence ProductTranslation has all the translatable fields of Product. It is a neat and quick approach and nice one as well.

But there is one disadvantage (not sure if it can be called disadvantage). If many more tables require translate-able fields, that many new tables are required. From my experience we took a different approach. We created a generic table for translation and a link table to link translations to the translate-able fields of the parent table.

So I'm going to use the previous example of Product which has two fields title and description that are translate-able to explain our approach. Also consider another table ProductCategory with fields name and description that also require translations.

Product
(
   ID: Integer
   SKU: String
   titleID: Integer // ID of LocalizableText record corresponding title
   descriptionID: Integer // ID of LocalizableText record corresponding description
)

ProductCategory
(
   ID: Integer
   nameID: Integer // ID of LocalizableText record corresponding name
   descriptionID: Integer // ID of LocalizableText record corresponding description
)

LocalizableText // This is nothing but a link table
{
    ID: Integer
}

Translations //This is where all translations are stored.
{
    ID: Integer
    localizableTextID: Integer
    language: String
    text: String
}

To load this data, I'm using different queries (modified the above). E.g. to load a product with ID @Id in the language @Language, I'd use the following query

SELECT
    p.ID,
    p.SKU,
    -- get title, description from the requested translation,
    -- or fall back to the default if not found:
    Title.text Title,
    description.text Description
  FROM Products p
  -- join requested translation for title, if available:
  LEFT OUTER JOIN Translations title
    ON p.titleID = title.localizableTextID
       AND title.Language = @Language
  -- join requested translation for description, if available:
  LEFT OUTER JOIN Translations description
    ON p.descriptionID = description.localizableTextID
       AND description.Language = @Language
  WHERE p.ID = @Id

This query is based on the assumption that individual fields of Product does not have a default translation

Similar query can be used to fetch records from ProductCategory