Laravel eloquent scope in relational model with where condition

I am using Laravel 5.1.

I have two database tables for multilingual data namely templates and translations as below:

templates: 
id(PK) type  template_text  
1      reg   abcd
2      otp   def

and

translations: 
id(PK) template_id(fk) locale_code translation
1      1               es          xyzw
2      1               gu          deft
3      2               es          yrc

The basic idea is, templates table will have records in English language, and translations table will contain respective multilingual data.

For example, for templates table record with id=1 refers to two languages es and gu in translations table. And record with id=2 of templates table have only es language available in translations table.

Now, I want to fetch the respective language record from translations table for the provided template table's type, if not available then it will get the template table's record.

e.g., for type='reg', if I provide language='gu' then it should return "deft", but for type='otp', if I provide language='gu' then it should return "def" because in translations table there is no record for language="gu" is available.

I can achieve it using:

$template = Template::with(array('translations' => function($query){
                return $query->where('language','=', 'gu');
            }))->where('type', '=', 'reg')->first();

And I can get the translations as an empty array and can handle this using if empty translations then use template_text.

But I want to handle it smartly, something like using scope etc.

I have created scope in Translations model and tried using

$template = Template::with('translations')
            ->whereHas('translations', function($q){
                $q->locale('gu');
            })->where('type', '=', 'reg')->first();

But it seems little clumsy and unclear and giving error.

Is there any smart way to handle this?

via Chebli Mohamed