Translating Models: With No Packages

We've covered translations for static text and routes, but what about the Models? What if we have a Blog Post that we want to store in a multi-language format?

There are quite a few ways to do this, but first, let's look at the simplest way without any packages:

Let's Get Started

For this demo, we will create Posts in multiple languages. The idea here will be:

• Make sure that we have a list of supported locales somewhere (for example in config/app.php as supportedLocales)
• Create a Post model that will have all the details about the post, except for the title and content
• Create a PostTranslation model that will have the title and content of the post in a specific language
• Automatically load the current locale translation of the post when we retrieve the post (with hasOne relation and attribute mutators in our Post model)
• Validate each translated field for each supported locale
• Create a Post and its translations in one go

Here's the database schema for our Post and its translations in PostTranslation:

Migration

Schema::create('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->id();
    $table->dateTime('publish_date')->nullable();
    $table->foreignId('user_id')->constrained();
    $table->softDeletes();
    $table->timestamps();
});
 
Schema::create('post_translations', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->id();
    $table->foreignId('post_id')->constrained()->cascadeOnDelete();
    $table->string('locale');
    $table->string('title');
    $table->longText('post');
    $table->softDeletes();
    $table->timestamps();
});

Our Post model, which will contain a title and post attributes to always have the current locale translation of the text:

app/Models/Post.php

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Casts\Attribute;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\BelongsTo;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\HasMany;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\HasOne;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\SoftDeletes;
 
class Post extends Model
{
    use SoftDeletes;
 
    protected $fillable = [
        'publish_date',
        'user_id',
    ];
 
    protected $casts = [
        'publish_date' => 'datetime',
    ];
 
    // Preloading current locale translation at all times
    protected $with = [
        'defaultTranslation'
    ];
 
    public function title(): Attribute
    {
        return new Attribute(
            // Always making sure that we have current locale title
            get: fn() => $this->defaultTranslation->title,
        );
    }
 
    public function post(): Attribute
    {
        return new Attribute(
            // Always making sure that we have current locale post model
            get: fn() => $this->defaultTranslation->post,
        );
    }
 
    public function author(): BelongsTo
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(User::class, 'user_id');
    }
 
    public function translations(): HasMany
    {
        return $this->hasMany(PostTranslation::class);
    }
 
    public function defaultTranslation(): HasOne
    {
        // Making sure that we always retrieve current locale information
        return $this->translations()->one()->where('locale', app()->getLocale());
    }
}

And our PostTranslation model:

app/Models/PostTranslation.php

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\BelongsTo;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\SoftDeletes;
 
class PostTranslation extends Model
{
    use SoftDeletes;
 
    protected $fillable = [
        'post_id',
        'locale',
        'title',
        'post',
    ];
 
    public function post(): BelongsTo
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(Post::class);
    }
}

Once we have our Models, we can look into our PostController and see how we can create a new post with translations...