What does bindtextdomain in PHP do

Question

I might be blind, but I don't see any good explanation here.
So, what does bindtextdomain do?

Answer 1

"The bindtextdomain() function sets the path for a domain. It returns the full pathname for the domain currently being set."

Taken from here.

It looks like bindtextdomain() was taken from C code - there's a bit more of an overview here, but I'm not sure how much of that applies to the PHP version.

Answer 2

From http://us3.php.net/manual/en/intro.gettext.php :

The gettext functions implement an NLS (Native Language Support) API which can be used to internationalize your PHP applications. Please see the gettext documentation for your system for a thorough explanation of these functions or view the docs at » http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html

Also, see the user notes on this page:

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/book.gettext.php