How to translate a shared Model in Django without breaking uniqueness?
Finally I've solved the problem by introducing a new layer, like follows:
There exist the models Area and Resource, both are now translatable and are created by admin staff, current users aren't allowed to create or modify them. These models will be more abstract to allow doing the matchings.
But, to allow more "precision" two new models have been added: AreaTag and ResourceTag. These two models are created by users, and they aren't translated. So we can have "application" and "applicación" areatags, but as the user has previously choosen an Area, we can do the searches using the Area, which will be common for both cases. So searching in the level Tag won't be necessary to find affinity.
Hope this helps someone trying to do something similar! :)
I'm working on a Django (v. 1.5.1) website and I have several models, such as RegisteredUser and Startup. Each of these two models has a Many2ManyField to an Area model. Area contains two fields: name and slug (which is built from name).
This design works well to find users and startups within the same areas, but there is a big problem when trying to internationalizate it. In this design, users create areas and attach them to RegisteredUser and Startup instances by themselves. But, if the same area is created in different languages then an area called computer science will be different from informática (Spanish version).
The idea is that users created areas just as if they were tags, but I think this will bring problems as the one described above.
So I was wondering about possible solutions:

When the user creates an area instance, she has to fill in all the translated versions for the area and the slug'd be calculated from the English version. But this doesn't seem very atrractive for the user. Does it?
The user can only choose from a list of predefined areas, which have been previously introduced and translated. But what about new ones? This option seems really hard to maintain...

For the translations I'm using django-transmeta.
So, I'd be glad to read your opinions and suggestions on how to deal with this problem.
Thanks a lot!