Given the amount of data (unless your app is very text heavy) It can be easier / better / quicker to get all the text for that language on load and then a simple getter to that array of information.

E.g. on load (base controller or whatever) get the entire language and store in an array/object.

Then get the text required by ID to that array/object This can be further optimised by caching this store - as a local store object. (e.g. not loaded on subsequent visits by the user)

Means one longer init query, but post that, no impact on the system. Given that a page could use 50 text translations it can be very beneficial.

This is a problem, for example opencart suffers from on something very similar. Front loading it all makes even a very light text page more efficient overall.

Again depends on your app - but worth considering.

Thank MatyHaty for your answer. Unfortunately the app will be very text heavy. That is what we 'sell'. For now I created an extra method in my model:

public function translate($fieldName) {
	return $this->newCollection((array)$this->hasMany('Translation', 'translatable_id', $fieldName)
		->with('language')->get())->inLanguage();
}

The Collection method does the following:

public function inLanguage()
{
	$models = $this;

	$returnArray = [];	

	foreach($models as $key => $model) {
		foreach($model as $languages) {
			$returnArray['to' . ucfirst(strtolower($languages->language->english_name))] = $languages->translation;
			$returnArray[strtolower($languages->language->abbreviation)] = $languages->translation;
		}
	}

	return (object) $returnArray;
}

So in my controller I can do the following:

ShopCategory::find(1)->translate('description')->en
or
ShopCategory::find(1)->translate('description')->toEnglish

This took the amount of queries back to three.

1. Select Category
2. Select Translatables/Translations (in this case description)
3. Select Language Meta data.

Downside of this method is that i have to re-create this method over and over for every model I want to make translatable. And when I need to collect multiple field (eg: product name, product short description, product description, et cetera) I drastically increase the amount of SQL-queries. Probably need to load the language meta data on app start up (as you suggest), but I am still having the problem of not being able to eager load a whole models translations.

Maybe you have an idea for this?

Thanks in advance!

Here is an different approach on translating Eloquent objects: https://github.com/vinkla/translator

Hello @deargonaut,

I 've created a package igaster/laravel-translate-eloquent that adds translation to any Eloquent Model. It requires only one additional table in your DB where all the translations will be stored...

• You can get/set a translated key as it was a normal Eloquent key (eg $article->title), when actually the correct translation will be looked up and returned from the Translations table...
• Of course you can request a translation to any locale.
• It supports a fallback locale if there is no translation in the current locale.

Hope it is usefull... Cheers!