Speeding up database access

I am just starting out on a project that has to be multi-lingual. i.e. every word/sentence I output has to be translated. The user logs in, and I read the language they use, by looking at the user record. I then need to get the language translations from a database. I just "select label, text from language where lang = "English"; Fields: [label],[text],[language] Example: "M1002","Please enter the delivery address","English" At the moment I download them into a associative array, so I can access the text like this. txt['M1002'] where 'M1002' is a label. I have made txt a session variable. The trouble is, there are so many text translations (6000+), that it takes about 10 seconds to download them all into this array. I don't want to access the database every time I need to print out some text. Question:- How can I improve the startup time?? In case it was not obvious from the above, I am a newbie at PHP!!