In this new post from Reddit.com a question is asked about website translations and the opinions on best practices for it.

I'm just curious what the best practices are for translating your website into another language, to present foreign readers with text in their home lingua -- well, particularly if there are PHP-specific methods to do so. I've stumbled across the pages for GNU gettext and that seems interesting, but I'm curious what people think of it.

Suggestions include manual translation via a human, use a text substitution method two swap out content versions based on language, using language files (and some opinions from others on which of these approaches might work best).