The Zend Developer Zone has a quick post today covering localization and points to another article with more information.
Localization is becoming more and more important for web designers and developers. It’s coming to a web site near you soon and you need to know how to do it and do it fast. And it isn’t only about swapping strings that you understand with ones you don’t, it is about doing it quickly and smoothly to give your site a global image.
The article, a piece by Pablo Hoch, does some benchmarking of the gettext functionality in PHP. He pits the pure PHP gettext function he wrote against an array containing string translations and the gettext extension. Not surprisingly, the extension beat both of them out, topping the array of strings by just a bit.