If you're a Web developer building an application for global consumption, it's important for you to build in a framework for multi-language support right from the start. Fortunately, there are a number of ready-made components that can help with this task. This article will introduce you to one such component, Zend_Translate, and demonstrate how you can use it to add multi-language support to your PHP application.

There's no "magic bullet" here that'll do the translation for you, but he shows you how to set up the data for the different languages, either in PHP arrays or in translation files, that the Zend_Translate component knows how to use. He also mentions the component's ability to scan a directory tree for language files an detect the language based on a naming convention. He also mentions the "gettext" tool that you can use to generate language files based on a standard GNU format that can be used cross-language with several different tools.

There's lots of other handy bits in the tutorial so I suggest reading if you're thinking about any kind of translation for your site.

Today i will continue the series of articles on the Zend Framework and i am going to talk about how i come to use the language component from Zend. The way i decided to go with it is by having a controller plugin that starts the language component and also detects the language.

He shows the creation of the bootstrap file to handle the different language requests in the URL and how to register the plugin for the application to use later on (GSD_Controller_Plugin_Language). The code for the plugin is included - it uses the Zend_Locale and Zend_Translate components to handle the translation between languages. This lets you push information out to the view and have the framework automatically translate it to the right language for you based on the URL.

Despite my best attempts I'm unable to speak this array of languages, but as a Web developer I wanted to create the most efficient means for hosting a multi-lingual support site, and then work with native speakers to translate the English material. Because the support site runs the Zend Framework, naturally I wondered whether some sort of translation component was available, and sure enough a quick perusal of the Zend Framework website turned up Zend_Translate. In this brief tutorial I'll document how I'm using the Zend Framework to make my website available to the world.

Jason breaks up the article into two main sections - an introduction to using the Zend_Translate component and examples of it in action (including the creation of CSV files to trade out the translations.