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

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).