Magento product translation for multiple multi-lingual websites

Question

I am wondering how to manage my product catalog for Magento efficiently. I keep one stock of products and sell them through multiple websites, those websites are in turn all in multiple languages.

The most common advice is to create a store for each website and a different store view per language, in which you can translate the product description. This doesn't seem very efficient to me. For example, if you have 4 different websites, each offering products in English and in Spanish, you have to do the same translation 4 times for each website. This becomes very cumbersome for multiple websites in multiple languages and a lot of products.

What I ideally would do, is maintain one translation per language and keep track of my product stock centrally (ie. still be able to manage the product globally). How can this be achieved in Magento?

Update: after digging around some more, asking in IRC channels, posting on forums, and searching the heck out of Google and the Magento Connect extension repository, I am starting to realise this is one of Magento's short comings. I am going to develop my own solution for this. Please leave a message here if you are interested in the same functionality, if there is enough response I will see if I can make it available for others.

Answer 1

Unfortunately there is no good answer to this question. Product texts are typically entered on the store view level, like you already discovered. Having multiple store views in the same language (but under different websites) will create a burden and overhead to configure.

If this was my store, I would pick one of these routes:

• Load data from an external source, where product data is already nicely managed. Managing product data in Magento can be a pain.
• Or, if you MUST do it in Magento, create a custom module to update all the relevant fields across multiple websites. You could create an event listener "on product save", that updates all texts for store views with the same language.
• or, you can override the product resource model, so product names, descriptions and some other texts are loaded differently from the database (but this would definately be the most complicated route).