If you've ever worked to develop a site which needed to be available in multiple languages then you know how difficult it can be. With the help of Symfony2′s Translation component you can easily make internationalized sites. I'll show you how with some sample code and some discussion on its API.

He includes a basic example of how the component works with the typical "hello world" translation from English to French. He mentions fallback locales, pluralization and the conversion between translation formats (like converting from a YAML file into a translation object).

If you use Doctrine, then you probably know how lazy loading can hurt your performance. I carefully craft every query to everything that I need in one shot, but only what I need. One thing that evaded me at first was the i18n part. I am pleased with the way Doctrine + symfony magically creates all my models and database tables with i18n support.

She talks a bit about the internationalization (i18n) support is put into the schema.yml file and the bit of confusion she had over how to handle a left join using its structure. The key lies in the Translation relationships.

If you develop Web applications that have an international target audience, then you have to take internationalization into account'"a process that includes avoiding date/time or currency confusions and delivering all text pertinent to the user interface in the user's preferred language. Applications that can grow international traffic and improve revenue must respect their clients' needs.

They use the I18N PEAR package to handle most of the hard work and include the howto on grabbing the package, the structure and how to use it to get a country name from a code, work with the translation of numbers, currency and changing up date/time strings.

I attended the SF PHP Meetup last night where Andrei Zmievski (PHP 6 release manager and PHP core team member) gave a talk on PHP 6 and internationalization (i18n). [...] It was evident that Andrei and team have given quite a bit of thought into what i18n means for the PHP world, and as a result, PHP developers everywhere will soon be enjoying a new set of tools to enable faster development of multi-lingual sites.

He also mentions the back-port that several of these features will get into the upcoming PHP 5.3 release (along with the much-hyped namespace support). You can check out Andrei's talk on his website.

The biggest problem is that most developers lack knowledge about Internationalisation, Localisation, Character encodings, Unicode and all those terms connected with multilingualism. The following article should give you a basic understanding and show you how to avoid those funny characters.

He defines a few terms - internationalization, ASCII, unicode and the UTF-8/ISO-8859 character sets. He mentions how to accept the utf-8 string into your application and how to use it in both PHP and store it in a MySQL database.

Larry Masters joins us once again to discuss internationalization and localization features in the upcoming CakePHP 1.2 release.

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In lack of a better idea, I founded a new PAT Package: patI18n. So far this package is just a draft and only exists in the SVN repository. As you might guess, patI18n is an abstraction layer for translating issues. Therefore it provides nearly the same interface as the famous GNU Gettext. Still, the actual translation is done by a chain of modules - this way everything is possible and the design stays open to new ideas.

He talks briefly about how it came to be and how it varies from some of the more traditional language translation tools. You can check out the example on his development environment or just use the snv details provided to grab the latest copy.

PHP scripts are typically stored under UTF-8 encoding to limit i18n headaches, while the console in which their output will be displayed is normally configured to some regional encoding, like IBM850 in Windows/XP French.

So we need a workaround...

He splits the process out into a few steps, each with its own explanation and code:

• Builtin tools
• Buffering
• Flushing
• PHP-GTK is not PHP for the Web
• Auto-flushing