What's the most efficient way to setup a multi-lingual website

Question

Hi,

I'm developing a website that will be available in different languages. It is a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setup, and it makes use of Smarty, mostly for the template engine.
The way we currently translate is by a self-written smarty plugin, which will recognize certain tags in the HTML files, and will find the corresponding tag in an earlier defined language file.

The HTML could look as follows:

<p>Hi, welcome to $#gamedesc;!</p>

And the language file could look like this:

gamedesc:Poing 2009$;
welcome:this is another tag$;

Which would then output

<p>Hi, welcome to Poing 2009!</p>

This system is very basic, but it is pretty hard to control, if I f.e. would like to keep track of what has been translated so far, or give certain users the rights to translate only certain tags.
I've been looking at some alternative ways to approach this, by either replacing the text-file with XML files which could store some extra meta-data, or by perhaps storing all the texts in the database, and retrieving it there.
My question is, what would be the best way to make this system both maintainable and perform well with high user-traffic? Are there perhaps any (lightweight) plugins I could take a look at?

Answer 1

Maybe taking a look to gettext lib could help you get some hints http://php.net/manual/en/book.gettext.php hope it helps!

Answer 2

You will need to have a table in your database that you can use to store strings of text, each with an composite ID. the composite ID will be made up of language ID and text node ID.

You will need to give the user a chance to select a preferred language. You should make sure that you either have a default "this has not been translated" for every language you use, or a default language that your entire site can be vied in.

For every bit of text with in your web site, rather then store the text with in the page, you just assign it an ID.

When serving the page, look up the text node ID and preferred language ID and load that string of text, or the string for the default.

Answer 3

You could give a shot at gettext. It is the way it is done in most C/C++ linux applications and it is an extension to PHP too. The idea is not very different from what you're already doing, but there are tools that ease the mantainance of translations (i.e. poedit).

For user rights to translations, gettext won't be of much help, I think you'll need to do it on your own or look at some frameworks if they have smarter solutions.

Answer 4

Looking around at web stuff today I came across this website: http://translateth.is/

It looks simple to use... copy paste in some javascript.

Answer 5

in our project, http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs, we use XML files to store translation key-value pairs. Browse our code: http://github.com/pkp/pkp-lib/blob/master/classes/i18n/PKPLocale.inc.php

We use that class to read the XML files for each locale and in our code we use Locale::translate('locale.key.name');. Similar to gettext, but using an XML file for easier updating.