BabelKit - Multilingual Code Description Lookup Table

BabelKit - Multilingual Code Description Lookup Table
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BabelKit is an interface to a universal multilingual code description lookup table. BabelKit takes all of the programming work out of maintaining multiple database code definition sets in multiple languages.

Don't need multilanguage code descriptions? Check out CodeKit, the unilingual universal code description lookup table.

BabelKit Administration Live Data Entry Demo

View Any Code
Translation Set

Add a New
Code Set

Add a New
Language

Enter and
Translate Codes

The code administration and translation page lets you define new virtual code tables, new languages, enter all codes and their descriptions and then translate them into all languages of interest.

Perl and PHP classes retrieve the code descriptions and automatically generate HTML code selection elements in the user's language. This makes internationalization and localization of web sites and database interfaces much easier.

Do some live data entry! Make up new code sets. Add new languages. Enter some new codes and translate them. Have fun. Cleaned up automatically once a day.

BabelKit HTML Select Demo

Select Display
Language

Day of Week
in German

Select Months
in Spanish

Submit to View
Selected Codes

This shows off multilingual HTML select elements. Make some selections and then change the display language to watch BabelKit strut its stuff! All without an ounce of programming. Well, maybe one ounce. You do have to call BabelKit :-)

BabelKit Downloads

BabelKit is available here as free software in PHP and Perl.

The current version is BabelKit-1.07.

Contact the author to report bugs, request features, or for database design and programming assistance.

BabelKit Documentation Set

Here is the index, the requirements and FAQ and the concepts and features overview.

BabelKit Translation Read Only Mode

Take a look at the code administration and translation interface in read only mode with clean demo data.

About Code Description Lookup Tables

Code description lookup tables are an important part of any database. They define the choices available for codified fields and supply the human readable descriptions for display purposes.

However, the naive approach of creating one new database table for each code description set involves a large software complexity overhead, especially when the descriptions need to be maintained in multiple languages.

I have designed and programmed many universal code tables during my career. A universal code table places all of the code tables into a single database table. That single universal database code table hosts as many virtual code tables as desired with no schema changes or coding.

BabelKit is an implementation of a universal code table which is also generalized in the language dimension. This supports internationalization and localization of any database.