On his Code Diesel blog Sameer Borate has posted about a Google Translation wrapper library that can be used to interface with Google's Translation backend.

Google translation is an interesting service. Not only can you do language translation, you can also detect the language of a particular text. I recently needed to create a Wordpress plugin to translate post titles from one language to another. As the translation API is only available for Java and Javascript, I decided to create a quick one for PHP.

You'll need to register for an API key before you can follow along with the examples. Sameer includes a few small code snippets showing how to run a "self test" to be sure things are working, a sample translation of a string and how to grab errors should they happen during the process. You can grab the library from the Google Code page for the project.

New from the CatsWhoCode.com blog there's a few helpful hints on making your WordPress theme easily translatable:

Althought English is the most represented language over the Internet, it is a good thing to think about people who speak other languages and offer them trabslated WordPress theme. In this step-by-step tutorial, you'll learn how to take a WordPress theme and make it translatable for any language.

You'll need to add in a few functions to handle the loading of various language templates and use them, along with language-specific .PO files, to make switching languages as simple as changing the value of a constant in a define.

DevShed has posted the second part of their series looking at an IP-to-Country mapping application, this time with a focus on building some simple applications to use the data inside.

Building a web site that will be seated on a multi-lingual platform often requires developing an IP-to-country application that permits you to map users' IP addresses to their corresponding countries. [...] This database contains over 82,0000 records and allows you to map more than 3,200,000 IP addresses to their respective countries. This can be really handy for developing different IP-to-country applications with minor efforts.

The review the previous article on making the database and move ahead to create a script that selects - based off the IP range - the country that address could be from.

Ken Guest has posted about a whitepaper that he was involved in editing - the PHP for Enterprise/Business Whitepaper:

As far as I know this is the first full English language translation and update of the work done by the Association Francaise des Utilisateurs de PHP (French PHP Users Group). Also there is a lot of new content in the Whitepaper that with regards to how PHP is now utilised in Enterprise. Figures have been updated and techniques available in later versions of PHP have been referenced.

He mentions some of the challenges in the translation and thanks a few others for the effort and contributions they made to the project. The whitepaper (pdf) looks at several key topics of PHP in the Enterprise including: suggestions for architecture, integration issues, concurrent use with other languages and how PHP fits into the web application ecosystem.

The Symfony blog has announced that their Forms in Action has now been posted online and you can download the first four chapters here.

These chapters covers everything you need to get started. If you are a developer, you can read all chapters, from 1 to 4. If you are more a web designer, then you probably only need to read chapter 3 to learn how to layout forms.

They've also been translated into French and can be found here. Content includes form creation, validation, Propel integration, nested forms, internationalization and some of the bundled widgets and validators that come with the framework.

Michael has posted a simple script today that takes in XML data and spits back out an array on the other side:

The function takes the specified XML data (which must be in valid XML format) and converts into an array. Any attributes in the XML elements are dropped an only the element values are placed in the array.

The code uses a combination of XPath, DOM, and regular expressions to parse the given XML content.

In a new post to the Web Tech blog over on SitePoint, Toby Somerville has posted something he calls "RoughTime" - his method for displaying a more "human friendly" output of a timestamp.

When asked the time, we generally don't need to be military accurate with our response [...] we generally communicate the approximate time. i.e. 'its nearly ten' or 'its just gone half past three'. Yet on the web, time is generally shown as '12:24:13 AM', or similar '" not very visitor friendly.

His RoughTime uses two switch statements to map the hour and minute values to different strings. For example, minutes between 15 and 20 become "quarter past" and the hours are changed over from numeric versions to their word counterparts.

On the Sanisoft blog today, there's a quick tutorial demonstrating how to create a multilingual application with the CakePHP framework:

There are basic two ways to creating a multilingual app in traditional PHP [...] CakePHP V1.2 is the framework which allows you to take the quantum leap of using gettext like functionality with minimum of hassles and at the same time address the common problems which a PHP programmer faces while creating multilingual apps.

They give an example of a simple translation of a sentence (including working with .po files). They show how to integrate the example string, create the .po file with the translation and configure the language to pull the correct phrasing to display to the page.

Rob Allen points out two new updates surrounding the translation of his "Getting Started with the Zend Framework" tutorial:

• A Danish translation done by Stig Benning
• An update to the German translation to keep it up to date with the latest version released (by Daniel Messer)

You can get these and lots of other translated versions from the tutorial's page on Rob's website. The tutorial has been tested up to version 0.9.1 of the Zend Framework.

In a new blog post, Rob Allen mentions a few different things going on in his life (like work, PHP news, and some on the Zend Framework). He mentions one thing that's great for those speaking Brazillian Portuguese - his Getting Started with the Zend Framework tutorial has been translated into the language.

Saving the biggest news for last, Adler Medrado has translated my tutorial into Brazillian Portuguese! Thank you very much Adler! I've said it before, and no doubt will say it again, I'm still very humbled that people think enough of my little tutorial to translate it. You guys are amazing.

You can grab this and other translations (including Simplified Chinese, French, German, Polish and Italian) from this page on Rob's blog.