Creating a multilanguage application

Every day, we meet more and more international companies, software products, and information resources that publish content on multiple languages. Yii2 provides built-in i18n support for making multilanguage applications.

In this recipe, we are translating the application interface to different languages.

Getting ready

Create a new yii2-app-basic application using the composer, as described in the official guide at http://www.yiiframework.com/doc-2.0/guide-start-installation.html.

How to do it…

1. Change the main menu labels in the views/layouts/main.php file to use the Yii::t('app/nav', '...') method:

   echo Nav::widget([
       'options' => ['class' => 'navbar-nav navbar-right'],
       'items' => [
           ['label' => Yii::t('app/nav', 'Home'), 'url' => ['/site/index']],
           ['label' => Yii::t('app/nav', 'About'), 'url' => ['/site/about']],
           ['label' => Yii::t('app/nav', 'Contact'), 'url' => ['/site/contact']],
           ...
      ...