Hi,
I'm designing a database schema for a custom content management
system. I have 3 types of content: articles, multimedia files, and Q&A
(Q&A is just like an article except that it is divided into a
'question' and 'answer' part). 

Each of these three content-types (or resources as I call them) can be
in more than one language and can also have one or more authors,
contributors, sources and be classified under multiple categories.
I've listed some of important columns from my tables below:
Articles           Multimedia               Q&A
--------           ----------               ---
articleid          multid                   qnaid
keywords           keywords                 keywords
title              title                    title
content            filepath                 question
                                            answer
Now I need tables to show which resource belongs to what categories,
authors, contributors, and sources. Here's an example table I designed
for the authors:

Resource_authors
----------------
resourcetype  (contains name of resource's table)
resourceid    (contains articleid in this case)
authorid      (id used to look up the author)

Then I have an 'authors' table which contains the authors id, name, & biography. 
My problem, is I need to figure out a way to the resource content,
author names, category names, contributor names, etc in multiple
languages.
I've seen several multilingual sites out there, and I was wondering if
there is a standard procedure to attack this issue. Performance is
also a consideration, as I already have over 30,000 articles
Also, in the Resource_authors table above, I want to know if there is
a better way to define the resource-author relationship without
storing the table name in 'resourcetype' Should I have a globallly
unique id to identify each resource?

TIA for any help.
-yahymf

I really would suggest combining the Article and Multimedia tables. I
really don't see why they should be different. You can see they have
virtually the same meta-information in those two tables. Just add
another 'column' that defines the resource type. Then of course you
can do away with the resource type in the Authors' table and reference
the resource directly. If I was doing it, I would probably combine the
Q&A table too, putting the Q and the A both in the content, then
separating them by either text parsing or fixed-width means.

But perhaps you have other reasons for keeping those tables separate...