Multilingual data modeling on MongoDB

Question

I am trying to model my objects on MonogoDB and not sure how to proceed. I am building a Product catalog that will be:

• No frequent changes to product catalog. A bulk operation may be done weekly / fortnight.
• Product information is in multiple languages ( English, Spanish , French ) new language may be added anytime.

Here is what I am trying to do: I need to model my product catalog to capture the multilingual functionality. Assume I have:

product : {   _id:xxx,  sku:"23456",  name:"Name",  description: "Product details",   tags:["x1","x2"]}...  } 

Surely, name,description, tags and possible images will change according to language. So, how do I model it?

1. I can have a seperate collection for each language eg: enProducts,esProducts etc

2. Have JSON representation in the product itself with the individual languages like:

   product :{    id: xxx,    en: {          name: "Name",          description: "product details.."        },    es: {          name: "Name",          description: "product details.."        },    ...    } 

Or is there any other solution? Need help of MongoDB modeling experts here :)

Answer 1

What about this approach:

product: {   id: 1,   name: 'Original Name',   description: 'Original Description',   price: 33,   date: '2019-03-13',   translations: {     es: {       name: 'Nombre Original',       description: 'Descripción Original',     }   } } 

If the user selects some language different to the default and the key translations exists in the object, you only need to merge it, and if any key has no translation, the original remains.

Another advantage is if you need to remove the translation feature or add/remove some language, you only need to change or remove the translation key and not having to refactor the entire schema.

Answer 2

Another option would be to just keep the values different per language. Would probably make maintaining the schema much easier as well:

product : {   _id:xxx,  sku: {    und: "23456"  },  name: {    en: "Fork",    de: "Gabel"  },  description: {    en: "A metal thingy with four spikes",    de: "Eine Dinge aus metal der vier spitze hat"  }   } 

und would be short for "undefined", i.e. the same for all languages, and could be used as a fallback - or you always use "en" as fallback if you'd prefer that.

The above example is roughly how Drupal CMS manages languages (albeit translated from SQL to Mongo).