Multilingual fields in DB tables

Question

I have an application that needs to support a multilingual interface, five languages to be exact. For the main part of the interface the standard ResourceBundle approach can

Answer 1

The standard translation approach as used, for example, in gettext is to use a single string to describe the concept and make a call to a translate method which translates to the destination language.

This way you only need to store in the database a single string (the canonical representation) and then make a call in your application to the translate method to get the translated string. No FKs and total flexibility at the cost of a little of runtime performance (and maybe a bit more of maintenance trouble, but with some thought there's no need to make maintenance a problem in this scenario).