Hi to all database designers!

As a newbie I hope I will get a useful hint to a design problem I'm
currently working on and I guess that I'm not the first one with this
problem:

I will have to deal with some text fields (BLOBS and VARCHAR) in my tables
and I need to support translations of those texts in oen database (even in
Japanese).
1) how to design the table that holds the texts in the different, and open
set of translations.

2) as I can't tell for a specific text if a certain translation is existing
I need an intelligent method to fall back to a default translation of that
text.

3) which character set to choose if e.g. Japanese texts should be possible


I'm looking forward for all comments and appreciate any help!

Thanks
Michael




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