What's the best database structure to keep multilingual data? [duplicate]

Answer 1

Have many to many relationship.

You have your data table, languages table and a data_language table.

In the data_language table you have

id, data_id, language_id

I think that might work best for your.

Answer 2

Similar to method 3:

[languages]
id (int PK)
code (varchar)

[products]
id (int PK)
neutral_fields (mixed)

[products_t]
id (int FK)
language (int FK)
translated_fields (mixed)
PRIMARY KEY: id,language

So for each table, make another table (in my case with "_t" suffix) which holds the translated fields. When you SELECT * FROM products, simply ... LEFT JOIN products_t ON products_t.id = products.id AND products_t.language = CURRENT_LANGUAGE.

Not that hard, and keeps you free from headaches.