Re: Multilingual Web application - how to?

I am currently am using the IntSmarty extension to Smarty (you can get it and more information at http://www.coggeshall.org/oss/intsmarty/index.php/7/). With it the translation(s) is stored as a flat file rather then a DB so it is easy to pass along to the translators and load. I personally find it simple to use and if the page is in the utf8 character set, capable of any language (I have English and 2 Asian Languages). As for the current language variable - it automagically loads the browsers current language from the preferences. Let me know if you would be interested in it (I have a _slightly_ hacked version to work with the utf8 character set rather then the latin character sets). other options I know of - gettext, PEAR has a couple of classes for translations, and I also believe that there are a couple of classes at phpclasses.org. Denis Gerasimov wrote:

Hello list, I need to develop a multilingual web site and I am looking for the best way of handling this task. There are three main issues I know: 1. Storing multilingual data in a database. Possible solutions I know: a. many tables, one per each supported language, e.g. news_en, news_de. b. one table having many columns with translations, e.g. (id, date, text_en, text_de) We use MySQL 4.1 as a back-end. 2. Multilingual HTML templates, possible solutions: a. one generic template for everything, one per each language, like contents_en.tpl.html, contents_de.tpl.html b. many localized templates for each page, e.g news_en.tpl.html, news_de.tpl.html Template engine is Smarty. 3. Storing current language variable, possible solutions: a. inside the URL like /en/news/ b. using cookies c. using sessions Web server is Apache2+mod_rewrite with PHP5 What are pros and cons for each solution? What are other possible solutions for the above issues? Best regards, Denis Gerasimov Outsourcing Services Manager, VEKOS, Ltd. www.vekos.ru

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