Handling translation without gettext

Translation is an important part of making your website accessible to an international customer base. One way this is accomplished it to use the PHP gettext functions, which are based on the GNU gettext operating system tools installed on the local server. gettext is well documented and well supported, but uses a legacy approach and has distinct disadvantages. Accordingly, in this recipe, we present an alternative approach to translation where you can build your own adapter.

Something important to recognize is that the programmatic translation tools available to PHP are primarily designed to provide limited translation of a word or phrase, referred to as the msgid (message ID). The translated equivalent is referred to as the msgstr (message string). Accordingly, incorporating translation typically only involves relatively unchanging items such as menus, forms, error or success messages, and so on. For the purposes of this recipe, we will assume that you...