multilingual website

[thosecars82]

hello guys

I want to develop a multilingual website with php. I do not have many ideas about how to do a site multilingual. I have been looking for some information but what I have got until now seems a bit confusing to me.

  The most obvious solution is having one static page for each language. Besides I have seen something about using a table in the database to extract the translations to the corresponding language. However, I have seen that it might take too long for people to see a page because the query might delay the process.

I do not know if this option is the best. Could you please provide me with some good and brilliant approach to solve this issue in any website of any size and with any number of different languages?

Thanks in advance

[bpat1434]

The best option I can suggest is to take all your typical English content and put it in a language file. This file could essentially be an array with one key to be one item. Something like:

<?php
// English language
$lang = array();

$lang['hello'] = 'Hello!';
$lang['welcome_txt'] = 'Welcome to my website.  Here you will find stuff about me.';

Another language file could just be the same keys with translated text.

<?php
// Deutsch
$lang = array();

$lang['hello'] = 'Hallo!';
$lang['welcome_txt'] = 'Wilkommen zu meines Website.  Hier kann mann informationen gegen mich finden.';

Then when a visitor hits your page, you can default to english, and give them the option to select a different language. Or you could use GeoIP to figure out what language would best suit them.

Then in your application or pages you could just call up the right text in the right spots:

<?php

$language = 'english';

if(isset($_COOKIE['lang']))
    $language = $_COOKIE['lang'];

include('./languages/' . $language . '.language.php');

echo '<h4>' . $lang['hello'] . '</h4>
<p class="welcome">' . $lang['welcome_txt'] . '</p>';