The Laravel News site has a new post today describing a feature of the upcoming Laravel 5.4 release: the ability to define language files with JSON formatted files.

One of the most wanted requests we receive at Laravel is introducing better support for multilingual web applications, there are already packages out there that add some nice functionality to Laravel for better handling of multilingual projects requirements, but one of the painful issues when building such applications is managing translation keys.

Previously the trans/trans_choice helper to reference the value defined in the PHP array from your language files by a key name. With this new functionality, a new __() helper method is defined that will look through the English translation file, locate the correct key and find the matching record in the requested language to return. They also show how to pass in some parameters into the translator and how to use it directly from Blade.