I'm building a multi-lingual web application using the MVC pattern as the starting position. The application has a number of forms that users will be interacting with and many of these forms will have fields that do a lookup from a database table, 'Province' for example.

If I need the options in these lists to be displayed in the users' language on the screen, I can see a couple of ways to do this:

  1. In the model. When querying the model, I can provide the language that I desire the results to be returned in. This would allow translations to be used everywhere that data from the model is displayed without changes. However, this also means that the Province model in my example (plus all other application models) now need to know how to do language translations.
  2. In the controller. I can query the model in the controller action as usual and then create a 'Translator' object that I can pass the results into before completing the action. This would imply that each controller action would potentially be duplicating the same translation code, violating the DRY principle.
  3. In the view. Since the presentation of the application is generally expected to exist in the views, and the language of the user doesn't impact the business logic of the system, an argument could be made that language translations belong here. Especially considering that a page could also contain static content that will need to be translated. The downside to this is that it would complicate the views somewhat, especially for the front-end designers who will have to work around the new translation code.

Is there an accepted best-practice for where text translations belong in the MCV pattern for web applications? Does this change at all if I were to be loading the select list options via an AJAX call instead of at page load time?

Thanks for the help!

model-view-controller web-applications architecture
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