A content management system provides a mechanism for representing a particular piece of metadata in multiple languages. The multilingual metadata system provides a user with an ability to visualize a single translation in a language of the user's preference or based on the user's locale. The system receives an indication that at least one metadata field associated with a managed object contains multilingual metadata. A locale metadata table and a new metadata table for the managed object are created using information from an original metadata table for the managed object. Two or more metadata field values representing at least two languages are received by the system. The metadata fields are tagged with locale information and stored in the locale metadata table in association with the at least one metadata field in the new metadata table.