# Best practice on multilingual documents with fallback

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/best-practice-on-multilingual-documents-with-fallback/7259>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [April 7, 2012, 6:08pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/best-practice-on-multilingual-documents-with-fallback/7259 "2012-04-07T18:08:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Arny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8dc957/32.png) [@Arny](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Arny)\
**Post date:** [April 7, 2012, 6:08pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/best-practice-on-multilingual-documents-with-fallback/7259/1 "2012-04-07T18:08:39Z")

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Hi,

I'm just sitting here and trying to find a good solution to build a  
multilingual document which supports several languages, but also has its  
default language.  
Let's say I have something like this:  
doc: {  
defaultLanguage: "en",  
localized: { "en": { ... english details here ...},  
"fr": { ... french details here ... }  
}}

So I want kind of fallback mechanism which is using the local property as  
setting..  
Let's say french user visits the page and gets the "fr" part (by partial  
selection). But if we got an german visitor it should select "en" which was  
set by defaultLanguage.  
Is this possible on ES part or will I have to do this on client-side and  
transfere ALL languages first, then choose the right one?

Another idea would be to store the default language as separate property  
(eg. localizedDefault), but then I'm still getting 2 language sets which is  
still causing doubled traffic  
Any idea on behalf of ES?

Thanks in advance.

---

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 3:33am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/best-practice-on-multilingual-documents-with-fallback/7259/2 "2017-07-06T03:33:19Z")

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