In my web application I am using two different Languages namely English and Arabic.
I have a search box in my web application in which if we search by name or part of the name then it will retrieve the values from DB by comparing the "Hometown" of the user
Explanation:
Like if a user belongs to hometown "California" and he searches a name say "Victor" then my query will first see the people who are having the same hometown "California" and in the list of people who have "California" as hometown the "Victor" *name* will be searched and it retrieve the users having "California" as their hometown and "victor" in their name or part of the name.
The problem is if the hometown "California" is saved in English it will compare and retrieve the values. But "California" will be saved as "كاليفورنيا" in Arabic. In this case the hometown comparison fails and it cant retrieve the values.
I wish that my query should find both are same hometown and retrieve the values. Is it possible?
What alternate I should think of for this logic for comparison. I am confused. Any suggestion please?
EDIT: *I have an Idea such that if the hometown is got then is it possible to use Google translator or transliterator and change the hometown to another language. if it is in english then to arabic or if it is in english then to arabic and give the search results joining both. Any suggestion?*
Transliterate all names into the same language (e.g. English) for searching, and use Levenstein edit distance to compute the similarity between the phonetic representations of the names. This will be slow if you simply compare your query with every name, but if you pre-index all of the place names in your database into a Burkhard-Keller tree, then they can be efficiently searched by edit distance from the query term.
This technique allows you to sort names by how close they actually match. You're probably more likely to find a match this way than using metaphone or double-metaphone, though this is more difficult to implement.