internationalization - Best way to internationalize simple PHP website

Question

I have to develop a pretty simple php website so I don't need framework. But it's must support multi language (EN/FR/CHINESE). I have looked for php built in system and I found two ways :

• intl module from php5.3 (http://php.net/manual/fr/book.intl.php)
• gettext (http://php.net/manual/fr/book.gettext.php)

I have no experience in i18n without framework, so any advices about what's the simplest way to support multi language ?

At end I just need a function that search translation into file (one file by language). EQ : trans('hello');

=> en.yaml (yaml or not, it's an example)

hello: "Hello world!"

=> fr.yaml

hello: "Bonjour tout le monde !"

And if possible I prefer Pure PHP implementations

Answer 1

Although ext/gettext and ext/intl are both related to i18 (internationalization), gettext deals with translation while intl deals with internationalizing things like number and date display, sorting orders and transliteration. So you'd actually need both for a complete i18-solution. Depending on your needs you may come up with an home-brew solution relying on the extensions mentioned above or your use components provided by some framework:

• Translation
  • Symfony 2 Translation component: https://github.com/symfony/Translation
  • Zend Framework Zend_Translate
• Internationalization
  • Zend Framework Zend_Locale

If you only need translation and the site is simple enough, perhaps your simple solution (reading a translation configuration file into an PHP array, using a simple function to retrieve a token) might be the easiest.

The most simple solution I can think of is:

$translation = array(
    'Hello world!' => array(
        'fr' => 'Bonjour tout le monde!',
        'de' => 'Hallo Welt!'
    )
);

if (!function_exists('gettext')) {
    function _($token, $lang = null) {
        global $translation;
        if (   empty($lang)
            || !array_key_exists($token, $translation)
            || !array_key_exists($lang, $translation[$token])
        ) {
            return $token;
        } else {
            return $translation[$token][$lang];
        }
    }
}

echo _('Hello World!');