Internationalisation and my PHP Development Infrastructure

By Tony Marston
2005-07-17


Possible Methods

There are several ways in which text in language 'A' can be replaced with text language 'B'. Before a solution can be designed it is necessary to examine the range of possibilities and weigh up the pros and cons of each one.

1. Are you going to run strings of text through a general-purpose translator, or replace one identifiable string with another?
2. Are you going to perform the translation/substitution as early as possible (i.e. as soon as you know what text needs to be output), or as late as possible (i.e. just before it is presented to the user)?
3. Are you going to put text into the output area and then translate it, or translate it first and then put it into the output area?
4. Are you going to identify each piece of text as a complete string, or give each one a smaller identity code?
5. Are you going to store the language variations in a database or in text files?
6. Are you going to put all the language variations into a single file, or have a separate file for each language?
7. If you use XML and XSL to produce all HTML output (as I do in my development infrastructure) could you perform all the translation during the XSL transformation?

Tutorial Pages:
» Introduction
» Possible Methods
» Design Decisions
» My Implementation - Directory Structure
» My Implementation - File Names
» My Implementation - Determine User Language
» My Implementation - Locate Language Subdirectory
» My Implementation - Load Screen Structure file
» My Implementation - Get Language Text
» My Implementation - Get Language Array
» My Implementation - Handling Dates
» My Implementation - Handling Numbers
» Conclusion
» References

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