Hello,

We're trying to add content translation to an existing application without changing the database layout too much.
The idea is to use a hibernate custom string type that will store the content in the default language in the current table and will use another table to store/retrieve the translated content in other languages (a single table for all entity translations).

We're stuck and don't know if we can do a custom type that can use two tables or how to approach this differently!
Has anyone attempted anything similar or has a better idea on this?

Thanks in advance,
Alex

One of my colleagues attempted a similar thing, but not at the database level. He used a library called gettext. Seems to be quite the popular approach.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/

Thanks for the reply, but we're trying to translate the content that the user is entering like titles, descriptions, etc.
Our interface is fully translatable right now.

Right now we're thinking to implement a custom UserType and load the translation for the current locale in the nullSafeGet method, but we're searching for a better solution.
Has anyone implemented a custom hibernate type that can pull the data from two tables? Or maybe have a better solution for this internationalization problem?

Thanks!