Internationalization, L10n and I18N

Location (l10n) : This is the process of adapting an internationalized application to a specific region or language using a specific locale and text translations. Source Wikipedia .

In theory, the term localization (l10n) is used synonymously with internationalization (i18n), and globalization is the summary of both terms.

For simplicity, what you want is to adapt your application to support other languages, date formats, time, and time according to the locale ) of the user, then you will use the term internationalization .

Configuration:

To internationalize your application with PHP, basically two aspects are important:

01: You can set the setlocale() function according to locale defined by the user or automatically identified by your application:

Ex:

setlocale (LC_ALL, 'pt_BR', 'pt_BR.utf8');

In this way you will change the format that the user views monetary value, date, strings and etc.

02: Translate strings for this you will use gettext available for dozens of languages and also for PHP .

  

NOTE: It is not effective to translate your website using arrays this causes upsetting for front-end and back-end development, as well as performance reasons.

To use gettext you need to know if your server supports this feature:

if (!function_exists("gettext")){
   echo "gettext não esta instalado\n";
}
else{
   echo "gettext é suportado\n";
}

See the PHP manual how to proceed with the installation and configuration of gettext .

After setting up your server your application is ready to be translated. Now just proceed with the development of your application's layers (MVC) normally, but with an exception so that gettext can identify and do the translation you will now use the _() function in your strings, strings will appear, model , view or controller

echo _("text to be translated");

// ou

echo gettext("text to be translated");

Translation of strings

I recommend the Poedit program to extract the strings from your application and generate your files .po ( Portable Object ) text containing your translations, an example below:

#: test.php:3
english/messages.po:
msgid "Hello World!"
msgstr "Hola Mundo"

This file can be translated by anyone with the help of Poedit or another publisher. When saving this file will be compiled another file .mo Machine Object a binary file that gettext uses for reading and translation of strings .

With your .mo translated, save to a folder according to each locale:

Portable Object files

.
├── i18n
│   ├── en_US
│   │   └── LC_MESSAGES
│   │       └── messages.mo
│   ├── en_UK
│   │   └── LC_MESSAGES
│   │       └── messages.mo
│   └── es_ES
│       └── LC_MESSAGES
│           └── messages.mo
└── index.php       

Your texts will automatically be translated according to the user's locale.

Considerations

Although at first glance gettext seems to be a little complex, once configured on your system your application can be translated and updated quickly and efficiently, and it allows other people who are not programmers respectively to work in the translations of the files in a synchronous way and using only a% editor of%.

There are some "cons" to this way to internationalize application, one of which is due to the .po binary files being stored in the server memory every change in the .mo files you will have to recompile and generate new .po files and this will restart your server.

Alternatives if your server does not support .mo

Alternatively you can use a similar PHP library to simulate the gettext function in the same way that WordPress uses as a fallback if there is no _() function. However, using this alternative results in a lot of server performance.