[ Thanks to Paul K
Egell-Johnsen for this link. ]
“If you are a web developer using PHP from small web
applications to large corporate portals with millions of page
views, you may suddenly find that you need your site or application
translated to another language. When your company opens
www.company.com.br you need your application in Portuguese, then
you’ll need it in Japanese and so on. You don’t have a
“translation” problem, you have an internationalization
problem.”
“Translating only implies simple string translation of code, you
may do it in a clever way or a painful (very) way scanning all the
code and translating strings. This method tends to produce errors
(Have you ever seen a site in Spanglish?) and it is not reusable,
just a patch. Internationalization defines a strategy to build
sites and applications that you can easily translate into other
languages. This is the goal of this article.”
“GNU has a very good set of tools to produce
internationalizable applications called gettext, it was developed
with “C” and “C++” applications in mind but is also very easy to
use in other languages such as PHP. Gettext is probably
installed on your Unix station, try a gettext command like
‘gettext’ from the command line to see if you have it. If not
(rare) download the package from ftp.gnu.org and install it. If you
have gettext the next stage is to use it from PHP.”