In this new tutorial to the NetTuts.com site author Jeff Reifman shows you how to use the Google Translate API to translate the content in your application/website to the language of your choosing. In his examples, he shows how to integrate it with a Yii framework application.

In this tutorial, I'll walk you through my extensions to the Yii I18n extract script which do exactly this. And I'll demonstrate translating my startup application, Meeting Planner, into a handful of languages. Keep in mind, Google Translate isn't perfect and it doesn't address issues related to time and date formats and currencies. But for a quick and affordable (free) way to build default translations for your web application into 50+ languages, this is an ideal solution.

He starts with a brief introduction to the Google Translate API, the languages it supports and how to install the library he's chosen to make the connection. He then gets into the internationalization (i18n) functionality that Yii has (an introduction to that is here) and how to define the "messages" files with the different content strings. These files are defined to there's no need to call out to the API for every piece of content that loads. He shows how to extend the message extraction handling to add in the API request and parsing the result. This information is then added to the current message information files, making it simpler to add in new strings. He then integrates this into the Meeting Planner application and shows how to run the script to call the Google API and switch the language with image results in several different languages of the finished output.