Website translation

[chrisguk]

Hi,

My vision was to have a small home page with two flags (images) at the top right of the page. For example a German and British flag. THe user clicks each flag and the text in the body of the page changes.

My dilema is I dont know where to go from here. This is what I have done so far:

1. Setup POEDIT to create the translations.

2. Installed PHP-gettext on the webserver.

3. Enclosed the necessary text in the webpage with the following:

<?php echo _("This is my example text"); ?>

4. Setup the folder structure for the "locale" as below:

/locale/de_DE/LC_MESSAGES/

5. Placed the following code at the top of the web page:

<?php


$lang = "de_DE";
if (isset($_GET['lang'])) $lang = $_GET['lang'];
putenv("LC_ALL=$lang");
setlocale(LC_ALL, $lang);
bindtextdomain("messages", "locale");
bind_textdomain_codeset('messages', 'UTF-8');
textdomain("messages");

?>

I have made a couple of translations to make sure the above works. Unfortunately it doesn't.

So my question is:

1. What can I do to the above to make sure it does work?
2. How can I achieve the flag system described in the example above. I thought calling a function but I dont know how to do that?
3. Are there any good tutorials available? or can some one give me some good detailed advice here?

Many thanks in advance

[dalecosp]

You might be re-inventing the wheel ... Google has a solution that might be as simple as adding some Javascript to your page(s).

That being said...

1. I don't know. I'd suggest the POEDIT vendor or support forums/user community.

2. What's clicking a flag going to do? If it's an HTML link, it will go to a URL ... that might be "page.php?lang=en_us" or something, I guess. If the link is a Javascript action, it's going to activate a whopping complex Javascript. See my opening comment ;-)

3. One approach that's used is a templating system that print variables ... which are determined at page load by inspection of a language variable/flag. This could be in a cookie, in the session, in GET ... wherever. The language resides in storage (often the database) and the application is supplied with a default language pack. Other language packs are available for "installation", or are user-definable/configurable via a control/admin panel. I can discuss that at some length if necessary.

[traq]

gettext is the industry solution - problem is, we don't know what the problem is. What do you mean when you say it doesn't work? What happens (vs. what you expected)?

Basics:
http://blog.lingohub.com/2013/07/php-internationalization-with-gettext-tutorial/
http://mel.melaxis.com/devblog/2005/08/06/localizing-php-web-sites-using-gettext/

[johanafm]

And what does the flag html look like?