Lucene with English and Spanish Best Practice?

[Chad Small]

Hello,

I'm interested in any feedback from anyone who has worked through implementing 
Internationalization (I18N) search with Lucene or has ideas for this requirement.  
Currently, we're using Lucene with straight English and are looking to add Spanish to 
the mix (with maybe more languages to follow).  

This is our current IndexWriter setup utilizing the PerFieldAnalyzerWrapper:

   PerFieldAnalyzerWrapper analyzer = new PerFieldAnalyzerWrapper(new 
StandardAnalyzer());
   analyzer.addAnalyzer(FIELD_TITLE_STARTS_WITH, new WhitespaceAnalyzer());
   analyzer.addAnalyzer(FIELD_CATEGORY, new WhitespaceAnalyzer());
   IndexWriter writer = new IndexWriter(indexDir, analyzer, create);

Would people suggest we switch this over to Snowball so there are English and Spanish 
Analyzers and IndexWriters?  Something like this:

PerFieldAnalyzerWrapper analyzerEnglish = new PerFieldAnalyzerWrapper(new 
SnowballAnalyzer("English"));
analyzerEnglish.addAnalyzer(FIELD_TITLE_STARTS_WITH, new WhitespaceAnalyzer());
analyzerEnglish.addAnalyzer(FIELD_CATEGORY, new WhitespaceAnalyzer());
IndexWriter writerEnglish = new IndexWriter(indexDir, analyzerEnglish, create);

PerFieldAnalyzerWrapper analyzerSpanish = new PerFieldAnalyzerWrapper(new 
SnowballAnalyzer("Spanish"));
analyzerSpanish.addAnalyzer(FIELD_TITLE_STARTS_WITH, new WhitespaceAnalyzer());
analyzerSpanish.addAnalyzer(FIELD_CATEGORY, new WhitespaceAnalyzer());
IndexWriter writerSpanish = new IndexWriter(indexDir, analyzerSpanish, create);


Are multiple indexes or mirrors of each index then usually created for every language? 
 We currently have 4 indexes that are all English.  Would we then create 4 more that 
are Spanish?  Then at search time we would determine the language and which set of 
indexes to search against, English or Spanish.

Or another approach could be to add a Spanish field to the existing 4 indexes since 
most of the indexes have only one field that will be translated from English to 
Spanish.


thanks a bunch,
chad.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]