Best practice multi language website

Question

I ve been struggling with this question for quite some months now  but I haven t been in a situation that I needed to explore all possible options before  Right now  I feel like it s time to get to know the possibilities and create my own personal preference to use in my upcoming projects   Let me first sketch the situation I m looking for  I m about to upgrade redevelop a content management system which I ve been using for quite a while now  However  I m feeling multi language is a great improvement to this system  Before I did not use any frameworks but I m going to use Laraval4 for the upcoming project  Laravel seems the best choice of a cleaner way to code PHP  Sidenote  Laraval4 should be no factor in your answer  I m looking for general ways of translation that are platform framework independent   What should be translated  As the system I am looking for needs to be as user friendly as possible the method of managing the translation should be inside the CMS  There should be no need to start up an FTP connection to modify translation files or any html php parsed templates   Furthermore  I m looking for the easiest way to translate multiple database tables perhaps without the need of making additional tables   What did I come up with myself  As I ve been searching  reading and trying things myself already  There are a couple of options I have  But I still don t feel like I ve reached a best practice method for what I am really seeking  Right now  this is what I ve come up with  but this method also has it side effects    PHP Parsed Templates  the template system should be parsed by PHP  This way I m able to insert the translated parameters into the HTML without having to open the templates and modify them  Besides that  PHP parsed templates gives me the ability to have 1 template for the complete website instead of having a subfolder for each language  which I ve had before   The method to reach this target can be either Smarty  TemplatePower  Laravel s Blade or any other template parser  As I said this should be independent to the written solution  Database Driven  perhaps I don t need to mention this again  But the solution should be database driven  The CMS is aimed to be object oriented and MVC  so I would need to think of a logical data structure for the strings  As my templates would be structured  templates Controller View php perhaps this structure would make the most sense  Controller View parameter  The database table would have these fields a long with a value field  Inside the templates we could use some sort method like echo     Controller View welcome   array  name    Joshua    and the parameter contains Welcome   name  Thus the result being Welcome  Joshua  This seems a good way to do this  because the parameters such as  name are easy to understand by the editor  Low Database Load  Of course the above system would cause loads of database load if these strings are being loaded on the go  Therefore I would need a caching system that re-renders the language files as soon as they are edited saved in the administration environment  Because files are generated  also a good file system layout is needed  I guess we can go with languages en EN Controller View php or  ini  whatever suits you best  Perhaps an  ini is even parsed quicker in the end  This fould should contain the data in the format parameter value    I guess this is the best way of doing this  since each View that is rendered can include it s own language file if it exists  Language parameters then should be loaded to a specific view and not in a global scope to prevent parameters from overwriting each other  Database Table translation  this in fact is the thing I m most worried about  I m looking for a way to create translations of News Pages etc  as quickly as possible  Having two tables for each module  for example News and News translations  is an option but it feels like to much work to get a good system  One of the things I came up with is based on a data versioning system I wrote  there is one database table name Translations  this table has a unique combination of language  tablename and primarykey  For instance  en En   News   1  Referring to the English version of the News item with ID 1   But there are 2 huge disadvantages to this method  first of all this table tends to get pretty long with a lot of data in the database and secondly it would be a hell of a job to use this setup to search the table  E g  searching for the SEO slug of the item would be a full text search  which is pretty dumb  But on the other hand  it s a quick way to create translatable content in every table very fast  but I don t believe this pro overweights the con s  Front-end Work  Also the front-end would need some thinking  Of course we would store the available languages in a database and  de active the ones we need  This way the script can generate a dropdown to select a language and the back-end can decide automatically what translations can be made using the CMS  The chosen language  e g  en EN  would then be used when getting the language file for a view or to get the right translation for a content item on the website    So  there they are  My ideas so far  They don t even include localization options for dates etc yet  but as my server supports PHP5 3 2  the best option is to use the intl extension as explained here  http   devzone zend com 1500 internationalization-in-php-53  - but this would be of use in any later stadium of development  For now the main issue is how to have the best practics of translation of the content in a website   Besides everything I explained here  I still have another thing which I haven t decided yet  it looks like a simple question  but in fact it s been giving me headaches   URL Translation  Should we do this or not  and in what way   So   if I have this url  http   www domain com about-us and English is my default language  Should this URL be translated into http   www domain com over-ons when I choose Dutch as my language  Or should we go the easy road and simply change the content of the page visible at  about  The last thing doesn t seem a valid option because that would generate multiple versions of the same URL  this indexing the content will fail the right way   Another option is using http   www domain com nl about-us instead  This generates at least a unique URL for each content  Also this would be easier to go to another language  for example http   www domain com en about-us and the URL provided is easier to understand for both Google and Human visitors  Using this option  what do we do with the default languages  Should the default language remove the language selected by default  So redirecting http   www domain com en about-us to http   www domain com about-us     In my eyes this is the best solution  because when the CMS is setup for only one language there is no need to have this language identification in the URL   And a third option is a combination from both options  using the  language-identification-less -URL  http   www domain com about-us  for the main language  And use an URL with a translated SEO slug for sublanguages  http   www domain com nl over-ons  amp  http   www domain com de uber-uns  I hope my question gets your heads cracking  they cracked mine for sure  It did help me already to work things out as a question here  Gave me a possibility to review the methods I ve used before and the idea s I m having for my upcoming CMS   I would like to thank you already for taking the time to read this bunch of text      Edit  1    I forgot to mention  the      function is an alias to translate a given string  Within this method there obviously should be some sort of fallback method where the default text is loaded when there are not translations available yet  If the translation is missing it should either be inserted or the translation file should be regenerated

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Database work  Create Language Table    languages     Fields  language id primary and auto increamented   language name  created at  created by  updated at  updated by  Create a table in database    content     Fields  content id primary and auto incremented   main content  header content  footer content  leftsidebar content  rightsidebar content  language id foreign key  referenced to languages table   created at  created by  updated at  updated by  Front End Work  When user selects any language from dropdown or any area then save selected language id in session like    SESSION  language   1  Now fetch data from database table    content    based on language id stored in session  Detail may found here   http   skillrow com multilingual-website-in-php-2

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What about WORDPRESS   MULTI-LANGUAGE SITE BASIS plugin    the site will have structure     example com eng category1       example com eng my-page     example com rus category1       example com rus my-page       The plugin provides Interface for Translation all phrases  with simple logic    ENG  my title -  Hello user   SPA  my title -  Holla usuario    then it can be outputed  echo translate  my title   LNG      LNG is auto-detected  p s  however  check  if the plugin is still active

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Just a sub answer  Absolutely use translated urls with a language identifier in front of them    http   www domain com nl over-ons Hybride solutions tend to get complicated  so I would just stick with it  Why  Cause the url is essential for SEO    About the db translation  Is the number of languages more or less fixed  Or rather unpredictable and dynamic  If it is fixed  I would just add new columns  otherwise go with multiple tables   But generally  why not use Drupal  I know everybody wants to build their own CMS cause it s faster  leaner  etc  etc  But that is just really a bad idea

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Implementing i18n Without The Performance Hit Using a Pre-Processor as suggested by Thomas Bley  At work  we recently went through implementation of i18n on a couple of our properties  and one of the things we kept struggling with was the performance hit of dealing with on-the-fly translation  then I discovered this great blog post by Thomas Bley which inspired the way we re using i18n to handle large traffic loads with minimal performance issues   Instead of calling functions for every translation operation  which as we know in PHP is expensive  we define our base files with placeholders  then use a pre-processor to cache those files  we store the file modification time to make sure we re serving the latest content at all times    The Translation Tags  Thomas uses  tr  and   tr  tags to define where translations start and end  Due to the fact that we re using TWIG  we don t want to use   to avoid confusion so we use   tr   and    tr   instead  Basically  this looks like this    return   tr  formatted value   tr       Note that Thomas suggests using the base English in the file  We don t do this because we don t want to have to modify all of the translation files if we change the value in English   The INI Files  Then  we create an INI file for each language  in the format placeholder   translated      lang fr ini formatted value   number format  value   Model Exchange  getEurRate    2                        lang en gb ini formatted value          number format  value   Model Exchange  getStgRate        lang en us ini formatted value         number format  value    It would be trivial to allow a user to modify these inside the CMS  just get the keypairs by a preg split on  n or   and making the CMS able to write to the INI files   The Pre-Processor Component  Essentially  Thomas suggests using a just-in-time  compiler   though  in truth  it s a preprocessor  function like this to take your translation files and create static PHP files on disk  This way  we essentially cache our translated files instead of calling a translation function for every string in the file      This function was written by Thomas Bley  not by me function translate  file       cache file    cache   LANG     basename  file      filemtime  file    php         re build translation    if   file exists  cache file          lang file    lang   LANG   ini        lang file php    cache   LANG     filemtime  lang file    php           convert  ini file into  php file     if   file exists  lang file php           file put contents  lang file php    lt  php  strings            var export parse ini file  lang file   true       LOCK EX                translate  php into localized  php file      tr   function  match  use   amp  lang file php          static  strings   null        if   strings   null  require  lang file php         return isset  strings   match 1        strings   match 1       match 1                 replace all  t abc  t  by tr       file put contents  cache file  preg replace callback             tr             tr        tr  file get contents  file    LOCK EX         return  cache file      Note  I didn t verify that the regex works  I didn t copy it from our company server  but you can see how the operation works   How to Call It  Again  this example is from Thomas Bley  not from me      instead of require  core example php    echo  new example   - gt now        we write define  LANG    en us    require translate  core example php     echo  new example   - gt now      We store the language in a cookie  or session variable if we can t get a cookie  and then retrieve it on every request  You could combine this with an optional   GET parameter to override the language  but I don t suggest subdomain-per-language or page-per-language because it ll make it harder to see which pages are popular and will reduce the value of inbound links as you ll have them more scarcely spread   Why use this method   We like this method of preprocessing for three reasons    The huge performance gain from not calling a whole bunch of functions for content which rarely changes  with this system  100k visitors in French will still only end up running translation replacement once   It doesn t add any load to our database  as it uses simple flat-files and is a pure-PHP solution  The ability to use PHP expressions within our translations    Getting Translated Database Content  We just add a column for content in our database called language  then we use an accessor method for the LANG constant which we defined earlier on  so our SQL calls  using ZF1  sadly  look like this    query   select  - gt from  this- gt  name                   - gt where  language       User  getLang                     - gt where  id              articleId                   - gt limit 1     Our articles have a compound primary key over id and language so article 54 can exist in all languages  Our LANG defaults to en US if not specified   URL Slug Translation  I d combine two things here  one is a function in your bootstrap which accepts a   GET parameter for language and overrides the cookie variable  and another is routing which accepts multiple slugs  Then you can do something like this in your routing     wilkommen    gt    welcome lang de      etc       These could be stored in a flat file which could be easily written to from your admin panel  JSON or XML may provide a good structure for supporting them   Notes Regarding A Few Other Options  PHP-based On-The-Fly Translation  I can t see that these offer any advantage over pre-processed translations   Front-end Based Translations  I ve long found these interesting  but there are a few caveats  For example  you have to make available to the user the entire list of phrases on your website that you plan to translate  this could be problematic if there are areas of the site you re keeping hidden or haven t allowed them access to   You d also have to assume that all of your users are willing and able to use Javascript on your site  but from my statistics  around 2 5  of our users are running without it  or using Noscript to block our sites from using it    Database-Driven Translations  PHP s database connectivity speeds are nothing to write home about  and this adds to the already high overhead of calling a function on every phrase to translate  The performance  amp  scalability issues seem overwhelming with this approach

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I had the same probem a while ago  before starting using Symfony framework    Just use a function      which has arameters pageId  or objectId  objectTable described in  2   target language and an optional parameter of fallback  default  language  The default language could be set in some global config in order to have an easier way to change it later  For storing the content in database i used following structure   pageId  language  content  variables      pageId would be a FK to your page you want to translate  if you have other objects  like news  galleries or whatever  just split it into 2 fields objectId  objectTable  language - obviously it would store the ISO language string EN en  LT lt  EN us etc  content - the text you want to translate together with the wildcards for variable replacing  Example  Hello mr    name    Your account balance is   balance     variables - the json encoded variables  PHP provides functions to quickly parse these  Example  name  Laurynas  balance  15 23   you mentioned also slug field  you could freely add it to this table just to have a quick way to search for it   Your database calls must be reduced to minimum with caching the translations  It must be stored in PHP array  because it is the fastest structure in PHP language  How you will make this caching is up to you  From my experience you should have a folder for each language supported and an array for each pageId  The cache should be rebuilt after you update the translation  ONLY the changed array should be regenerated  i think i answered that in  2 your idea is perfectly logical  this one is pretty simple and i think will not make you any problems    URLs should be translated using the stored slugs in the translation table   Final words  it is always good to research the best practices  but do not reinvent the wheel  just take and use the components from well known frameworks and use them   take a look at Symfony translation component  It could be a good code base for you

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A really simple option that works with any website where you can upload Javascript is www multilingualizer com  It lets you put all text for all languages onto one page and then hides the languages the user doesn t need to see  Works well

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As a person who live in Quebec where almost all site is french and english    i have try many if not most multilanguage plugin for WP    the one an only usefull solution that work nive with all my site is mQtranslate    i live and die with it    https   wordpress org plugins mqtranslate

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I am not going to attempt to refine the answers already given  Instead I will tell you about the way my own OOP PHP framework handles translations   Internally  my framework use codes like en  fr  es  cn and so on  An array holds the languages supported by the website  array  en   fr   es   cn   The language code is passed via   GET  lang fr  and if not passed or not valid  it is set to the first language in the array  So at any time during program execution and from the very beginning  the current language is known   It is useful to understand the kind of content that needs to be translated in a typical application   1  error messages from classes  or procedural code  2  non-error messages from classes  or procedural code  3  page content  usually store in a database  4  site-wide strings  like website name  5  script-specific strings  The first type is simple to understand  Basically  we are talking about messages like  could not connect to the database       These messages only need to be loaded when an error occurs  My manager class receives a call from the other classes and using the information passed as parameters simply goes to relevant the class folder and retrieves the error file   The second type of error message is more like the messages you get when the validation of a form went wrong    You cannot leave     blank  or  please choose a password with more than 5 characters    The strings need to be loaded before the class runs I know what is   For the actual page content  I use one table per language  each table prefixed by the code for the language  So en content is the table with English language content  es content is for spain  cn content for China and fr content is the French stuff   The fourth kind of string is relevant throughout your website  This is loaded via a configuration file named using the code for the language  that is en lang php  es lang php and so on  In the global language file you will need to load the translated languages such as array  English   Chinese    Spanish   French   in the English global file and array  Anglais   Chinois    Espagnol    Francais   in the French file  So when you populate a dropdown for language selection  it is in the correct language     Finally you have the script-specific strings  So if you write a cooking application  it might be  Your oven was not hot enough     In my application cycle  the global language file is loaded first  In there you will find not just global strings  like  Jack s Website   but also settings for some of the classes  Basically anything that is language or culture-dependent  Some of the strings in there include masks for dates  MMDDYYYY or DDMMYYYY   or ISO Language Codes  In the main language file  I include strings for individual classes becaue there are so few of them    The second and last language file that is read from disk is the script language file  lang en home welcome php is the language file for the home welcome script  A script is defined by a mode  home  and an action  welcome   Each script has its own folder with config and lang files   The script pulls the content from the database naming the content table as  explained above    If something goes wrong  the manager knows where to get the language-dependent error file  That file is only loaded in case of an error    So the conclusion is obvious  Think about the translation issues before you start developing an application or framework  You also need a development workflow that incorporates translations  With my framework  I develop the whole site in English and then translate all the relevant files    Just a quick final word on the way the translation strings are implemented  My framework has a single global  the  manager  which runs services available to any other service  So for example the form service gets hold of the html service and uses it to write the html  One of the services on my system is the translator service   translator- set  service  code  string  sets a string for the current language  The language file is a list of such statements   translator- get  service  code  retrieves a translation string  The  code can be numeric like 1 or a string like  no connection   There can be no clash between services because each has its own namespace in the translator s data area    I post this here in the hope it will save somebody the task of reinventing the wheel like I had to do a few long years ago

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I suggest you not to invent a wheel and use gettext and ISO languages abbrevs list  Have you seen how i18n l10n implemented in popular CMSes or frameworks    Using gettext you will have a powerful tool where many of cases is already implemented like plural forms of numbers  In english you have only 2 options  singular and plural  But in Russian for example there are 3 forms and its not as simple as in english   Also many translators already have experience to work with gettext   Take a look to CakePHP or Drupal   Both multilingual enabled  CakePHP as example of interface localization and Drupal as example of content translation   For l10n using database isn t the case at all  It will be tons on queries  Standard approach is to get all l10n data in memory in early stage  or during first call to i10n function if you prefer lazy loading   It can be reading from  po file or from DB all data at once  And than just read requested strings from array   If you need to implement online tool to translate interface you can have all that data in DB but than still save all data to file to work with it  To reduce amount of data in memory you can split all your translated messages strings into groups and than load only that groups you need if it will be possible   So you totally right in your  3  With one exception  usually it is one big file not a per-controller file or so  Because it is best for performance to open one file  You probably know that some highloaded web apps compiles all PHP code in one file to avoid file operations when include require called   About URLs  Google indirectly suggest to use translation       to clearly indicate French content    http   example ca fr v  lo-de-montagne html   Also i think you need to redirect user to default language prefix e g  http   examlpe com about-us will redirects to http   examlpe com en about-us But if your site use only one language so you don t need prefixes at all   Check out  http   www audiomicro com trailer-hit-impact-psychodrama-sound-effects-836925 http   nl audiomicro com aanhangwagen-hit-effect-psychodrama-geluidseffecten-836925 http   de audiomicro com anhanger-hit-auswirkungen-psychodrama-sound-effekte-836925  Translating content is more difficult task  I think it will be some differences with different types of content e g  articles  menu items etc  But in  4 you re in the right way  Take a look in Drupal to have more ideas  It have clear enough DB schema and good enough interface for translating  Like you creating article and select language for it  And than you can later translate it to other languages     I think it isn t problem with URL slugs  You can just create separate table for slugs and it will be right decision  Also using right indexes it isn t problem to query table even with huge amount of data  And it wasn t full text search but string match if will use varchar data type for slug and you can have an index on that field too   PS Sorry  my English is far from perfect though

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I will suggest you not to really depend of database for translation it could be really a messy task and could be a extreme problem in case of data encoding   I had face similar issue while ago and written following class to solve my problem  Object  Locale Locale   lt  php    namespace Locale     class Locale      Following array stolen from Zend Framework public  country to locale   array       AD    gt   ca AD        AE    gt   ar AE        AF    gt   fa AF        AG    gt   en AG        AI    gt   en AI        AL    gt   sq AL        AM    gt   hy AM        AN    gt   pap AN        AO    gt   pt AO        AQ    gt   und AQ        AR    gt   es AR        AS    gt   sm AS        AT    gt   de AT        AU    gt   en AU        AW    gt   nl AW        AX    gt   sv AX        AZ    gt   az Latn AZ        BA    gt   bs BA        BB    gt   en BB        BD    gt   bn BD        BE    gt   nl BE        BF    gt   mos BF        BG    gt   bg BG        BH    gt   ar BH        BI    gt   rn BI        BJ    gt   fr BJ        BL    gt   fr BL        BM    gt   en BM        BN    gt   ms BN        BO    gt   es BO        BR    gt   pt BR        BS    gt   en BS        BT    gt   dz BT        BV    gt   und BV        BW    gt   en BW        BY    gt   be BY        BZ    gt   en BZ        CA    gt   en CA        CC    gt   ms CC        CD    gt   sw CD        CF    gt   fr CF        CG    gt   fr CG        CH    gt   de CH        CI    gt   fr CI        CK    gt   en CK        CL    gt   es CL        CM    gt   fr CM        CN    gt   zh Hans CN        CO    gt   es CO        CR    gt   es CR        CU    gt   es CU        CV    gt   kea CV        CX    gt   en CX        CY    gt   el CY        CZ    gt   cs CZ        DE    gt   de DE        DJ    gt   aa DJ        DK    gt   da DK        DM    gt   en DM        DO    gt   es DO        DZ    gt   ar DZ        EC    gt   es EC        EE    gt   et EE        EG    gt   ar EG        EH    gt   ar EH        ER    gt   ti ER        ES    gt   es ES        ET    gt   en ET        FI    gt   fi FI        FJ    gt   hi FJ        FK    gt   en FK        FM    gt   chk FM        FO    gt   fo FO        FR    gt   fr FR        GA    gt   fr GA        GB    gt   en GB        GD    gt   en GD        GE    gt   ka GE        GF    gt   fr GF        GG    gt   en GG        GH    gt   ak GH        GI    gt   en GI        GL    gt   iu GL        GM    gt   en GM        GN    gt   fr GN        GP    gt   fr GP        GQ    gt   fan GQ        GR    gt   el GR        GS    gt   und GS        GT    gt   es GT        GU    gt   en GU        GW    gt   pt GW        GY    gt   en GY        HK    gt   zh Hant HK        HM    gt   und HM        HN    gt   es HN        HR    gt   hr HR        HT    gt   ht HT        HU    gt   hu HU        ID    gt   id ID        IE    gt   en IE        IL    gt   he IL        IM    gt   en IM        IN    gt   hi IN        IO    gt   und IO        IQ    gt   ar IQ        IR    gt   fa IR        IS    gt   is IS        IT    gt   it IT        JE    gt   en JE        JM    gt   en JM        JO    gt   ar JO        JP    gt   ja JP        KE    gt   en KE        KG    gt   ky Cyrl KG        KH    gt   km KH        KI    gt   en KI        KM    gt   ar KM        KN    gt   en KN        KP    gt   ko KP        KR    gt   ko KR        KW    gt   ar KW        KY    gt   en KY        KZ    gt   ru KZ        LA    gt   lo LA        LB    gt   ar LB        LC    gt   en LC        LI    gt   de LI        LK    gt   si LK        LR    gt   en LR        LS    gt   st LS        LT    gt   lt LT        LU    gt   fr LU        LV    gt   lv LV        LY    gt   ar LY        MA    gt   ar MA        MC    gt   fr MC        MD    gt   ro MD        ME    gt   sr Latn ME        MF    gt   fr MF        MG    gt   mg MG        MH    gt   mh MH        MK    gt   mk MK        ML    gt   bm ML        MM    gt   my MM        MN    gt   mn Cyrl MN        MO    gt   zh Hant MO        MP    gt   en MP        MQ    gt   fr MQ        MR    gt   ar MR        MS    gt   en MS        MT    gt   mt MT        MU    gt   mfe MU        MV    gt   dv MV        MW    gt   ny MW        MX    gt   es MX        MY    gt   ms MY        MZ    gt   pt MZ        NA    gt   kj NA        NC    gt   fr NC        NE    gt   ha Latn NE        NF    gt   en NF        NG    gt   en NG        NI    gt   es NI        NL    gt   nl NL        NO    gt   nb NO        NP    gt   ne NP        NR    gt   en NR        NU    gt   niu NU        NZ    gt   en NZ        OM    gt   ar OM        PA    gt   es PA        PE    gt   es PE        PF    gt   fr PF        PG    gt   tpi PG        PH    gt   fil PH        PK    gt   ur PK        PL    gt   pl PL        PM    gt   fr PM        PN    gt   en PN        PR    gt   es PR        PS    gt   ar PS        PT    gt   pt PT        PW    gt   pau PW        PY    gt   gn PY        QA    gt   ar QA        RE    gt   fr RE        RO    gt   ro RO        RS    gt   sr Cyrl RS        RU    gt   ru RU        RW    gt   rw RW        SA    gt   ar SA        SB    gt   en SB        SC    gt   crs SC        SD    gt   ar SD        SE    gt   sv SE        SG    gt   en SG        SH    gt   en SH        SI    gt   sl SI        SJ    gt   nb SJ        SK    gt   sk SK        SL    gt   kri SL        SM    gt   it SM        SN    gt   fr SN        SO    gt   sw SO        SR    gt   srn SR        ST    gt   pt ST        SV    gt   es SV        SY    gt   ar SY        SZ    gt   en SZ        TC    gt   en TC        TD    gt   fr TD        TF    gt   und TF        TG    gt   fr TG        TH    gt   th TH        TJ    gt   tg Cyrl TJ        TK    gt   tkl TK        TL    gt   pt TL        TM    gt   tk TM        TN    gt   ar TN        TO    gt   to TO        TR    gt   tr TR        TT    gt   en TT        TV    gt   tvl TV        TW    gt   zh Hant TW        TZ    gt   sw TZ        UA    gt   uk UA        UG    gt   sw UG        UM    gt   en UM        US    gt   en US        UY    gt   es UY        UZ    gt   uz Cyrl UZ        VA    gt   it VA        VC    gt   en VC        VE    gt   es VE        VG    gt   en VG        VI    gt   en VI        VN    gt   vn VN        VU    gt   bi VU        WF    gt   wls WF        WS    gt   sm WS        YE    gt   ar YE        YT    gt   swb YT        ZA    gt   en ZA        ZM    gt   en ZM        ZW    gt   sn ZW             Store the transaltion for specific languages        var array     protected  translation   array            Current locale        var string     protected  locale          Default locale        var string     protected  default locale              var string     protected  locale dir          Construct            param string  locale dir                 public function   construct  locale dir         this- gt locale dir    locale dir            Set the user define localte        param string  locale                 public function setLocale  locale   null         this- gt locale    locale       return  this            Get the user define locale        return string     public function getLocale         return  this- gt locale            Get the Default locale        return string     public function getDefaultLocale         return  this- gt default locale            Set the default locale        param string  locale                 public function setDefaultLocale  locale         this- gt default locale    locale       return  this            Determine if transltion exist or translation key exist        param string  locale                 param string  key                 return boolean     public function hasTranslation  locale   key   null        if  null     key  amp  amp  isset  this- gt translation  locale              return true        elseif  isset  this- gt translation  locale   key              return true             return false            Get the transltion for required locale or transtion for key        param string  locale                 param string  key                 return array     public function getTranslation  locale   key   null        if  null     key  amp  amp   this- gt hasTranslation  locale             return  this- gt translation  locale         elseif   this- gt hasTranslation  locale   key             return  this- gt translation  locale   key              return array              Set the transtion for required locale        param string  locale               Language code     param string  trans               translations array     public function setTranslation  locale   trans   array           this- gt translation  locale     trans            Remove transltions for required locale        param string  locale                 public function removeTranslation  locale   null        if  null      locale            unset  this- gt translation         else           unset  this- gt translation  locale                    Initialize locale        param string  locale                 public function init  locale   null   default locale   null           check if previously set locale exist or not      this- gt init locale        if   this- gt locale    null            return             if   locale    null       preg match     a-z    a-zA-Z         locale   amp  amp    preg match     a-z    a-zA-Z    a-zA-Z         locale               this- gt detectLocale          else            this- gt locale    locale              this- gt init locale              Attempt to autodetect locale        return void     private function detectLocale          locale   false          GeoIP     if  function exists  geoip country code by name    amp  amp  isset   SERVER  REMOTE ADDR                 country   geoip country code by name   SERVER  REMOTE ADDR              if   country                  locale   isset  this- gt country to locale  country      this- gt country to locale  country    false                          Try detecting locale from browser headers     if     locale             if  isset   SERVER  HTTP ACCEPT LANGUAGE                     languages   explode        SERVER  HTTP ACCEPT LANGUAGE                  foreach   languages as  lang                      lang   str replace  -        trim  lang                     if  strpos  lang           false                         if  isset  this- gt country to locale strtoupper  lang                                 locale    this- gt country to locale strtoupper  lang                                            else                         lang   explode       lang                        if  count  lang     3                               language Encoding COUNTRY                          this- gt locale   strtolower  lang 0     ucfirst  lang 1     strtoupper  lang 2                          else                              language COUNTRY                          this- gt locale   strtolower  lang 0     strtoupper  lang 1                                               return                                                          Resort to default locale specified in config file     if     locale             this- gt locale    this- gt default locale                  Check if config for selected locale exists        return void     private function init locale         if    file exists sprintf   s  s php    this- gt locale dir   this- gt locale               this- gt locale    this- gt default locale                  Load a Transtion into array        return void     private function loadTranslation  locale   null   force   false        if   locale    null           locale    this- gt locale       if     this- gt hasTranslation  locale              this- gt setTranslation  locale  include  sprintf   s  s php    this- gt locale dir   locale                     Translate a key        param               string Key to be translated     param               string optional arguments     return string     public function translate  key         this- gt init         this- gt loadTranslation  this- gt locale        if     this- gt hasTranslation  this- gt locale   key              if   this- gt locale      this- gt default locale                  this- gt loadTranslation  this- gt default locale                if   this- gt hasTranslation  this- gt default locale   key                       translation    this- gt getTranslation  this- gt default locale   key                 else                      return key as it is or log error here                 return  key                          else               return  key                  else            translation    this- gt getTranslation  this- gt locale   key                Replace arguments     if  false     strpos  translation    a                replace   array             args   func get args            for   i   1   max   count  args    i  lt   max   i                    replace   a      i           args  i                        interpolate replacement values into the messsage then return         return strtr  translation   replace              return  translation          Usage    lt  php         locale en php      return array          name    gt   Hello  a 1           name full    gt   Hello  a 1   a 2           locale   new Locale   DIR       locale     locale- gt setLocale  en      load en php from locale dir   want to work with auto detection comment  locale- gt setLocale  en     echo  locale- gt translate  name    Foo    echo  locale- gt translate  name    Foo    Bar      How it works   a 1  is replaced by 1st argument passed to method Locale  translate  key name   arg1    a 2  is replaced by 2nd argument passed to method Locale  translate  key name   arg1   arg2    How detection works   By default if geoip is installed then it will return country code by geoip country code by name and if geoip is not installed the fallback to HTTP ACCEPT LANGUAGE header

User · Answer

It depends on how much content your website has  At first I used a database like all other people here  but it can be time-consuming to script all the workings of a database  I don t say that this is an ideal method and especially if you have a lot of text  but if you want to do it fast without using a database  this method could work  though  you can t allow users to input data which will be used as translation-files  But if you add the translations yourself  it will work   Let s say you have this text    Welcome    You can input this in a database with translations  but you can also do this    welcome   array   English   gt  Welcome     German   gt  Willkommen     French   gt  Bienvenue     Turkish   gt  Hosgeldiniz     Russian   gt                       Dutch   gt  Welkom     Swedish   gt  V  lkommen     Basque   gt  Ongietorri     Spanish   gt  Bienvenito    Welsh   gt  Croeso       Now  if your website uses a cookie  you have this for example     COOKIE  language      To make it easy let s transform it in a code which can easily be used    language   COOKIE  language      If your cookie language is Welsh and you have this piece of code   echo  welcome  language     The result of this will be   Croeso    If you need to add a lot of translations for your website and a database is too consuming  using an array can be an ideal solution

User · Answer

Topic s premise There are three distinct aspects in a multilingual site   interface translation content url routing  While they all interconnected in different ways  from CMS point of view they are managed using different UI elements and stored differently  You seem to be confident in your implementation and understanding of the first two  The question was about the latter aspect -  quot URL Translation  Should we do this or not  and in what way  quot  What the URL can be made of  A very important thing is  don t get fancy with IDN  Instead favor transliteration  also  transcription and romanization   While at first glance IDN seems viable option for international URLs  it actually does not work as advertised for two reasons   some browsers will turn the non-ASCII chars like     or      into   D1 87  and   C5 BE  if user has custom themes  the theme s font is very likely to not have symbols for those letters  I actually tried to IDN approach few years ago in a Yii based project  horrible framework  IMHO   I encountered both of the above mentioned problems before scraping that solution  Also  I suspect that it might be an attack vector  Available options     as I see them  Basically you have two choices  that could be abstracted as   http   site tld   query   where   query  determines both language and content choice  http   site tld   language    query   where   language  part of URL defines the choice of language and   query  is used only to identify the content   Query is   and O    Lets say you pick http   site tld   query   In that case you have one primary source of language  the content of   query  segment  and two additional sources   value   COOKIE  lang   for that particular browser list of languages in HTTP Accept-Language  1    2  header  First  you need to match the query to one of defined routing patterns  if your pick is Laravel  then read here    On successful match of pattern you then need to find the language  You would have to go through all the segments of the pattern  Find the potential translations for all of those segments and determine which language was used  The two additional sources  cookie and header  would be used to resolve routing conflicts  when  not  quot if quot   they arise  Take for example  http   site tld blog novinka  That s transliteration of  quot               quot   that in English means approximately  quot blog quot    quot latest quot   As you can already notice  in Russian  quot      quot  will be transliterated as  quot blog quot   Which means that for the first part of   query  you  in the best case scenario  will end up with   en    ru   list of possible languages   Then you take next segment -  quot novinka quot   That might have only one language on the list of possibilities    ru    When the list has one item  you have successfully found the language  But if you end up with 2  example  Russian and Ukrainian  or more possibilities    or 0 possibilities  as a case might be  You will have to use cookie and or header to find the correct option  And if all else fails  you pick the site s default language  Language as parameter The alternative is to use URL  that can be defined as http   site tld   language    query   In this case  when translating query  you do not need to guess the language  because at that point you already know which to use  There is also a secondary source of language  the cookie value  But here there is no point in messing with Accept-Language header  because you are not dealing with unknown amount of possible languages in case of  quot cold start quot   when user first time opens site with custom query   Instead you have 3 simple  prioritized options   if   language  segment is set  use it if   COOKIE  lang   is set  use it use default language  When you have the language  you simply attempt to translate the query  and if translation fails  use the  quot default value quot  for that particular segment  based on routing results   Isn t here a third option  Yes  technically you can combine both approaches  but that would complicate the process and only accommodate people who want to manually change URL of http   site tld en news to http   site tld de news and expect the news page to change to German  But even this case could probable be mitigated using cookie value  which would contain information about previous choice of language   to implement with less magic and hope  Which approach to use  As you might already guessed  I would recommend http   site tld   language    query  as the more sensible option  Also in real word situation you would have 3rd major part in URL   quot title quot   As in name of the product in online shop or headline of article in news site  Example  http   site tld en news article 121415 EU-as-global-reserve-currency In this case   news article 121415  would be the query  and the  EU-as-global-reserve-currency  is title  Purely for SEO purposes  Can it be done in Laravel  Kinda  but not by default  I am not too familiar with it  but from what I have seen  Laravel uses simple pattern-based routing mechanism  To implement multilingual URLs you will probably have to extend core class es   because multilingual routing need access to different forms of storage  database  cache and or configuration files   It s routed  What now  As a result of all you would end up with two valuable pieces of information  current language and translated segments of query  These values then can be used to dispatch to the class es  which will produce the result  Basically  the following URL  http   site tld ru blog novinka  or the version without   ru   gets turned into something like  parameters         language    gt   ru       classname    gt   blog       method    gt   latest       Which you just use for dispatching   instance   new   parameter  classname      instance- gt   get   parameters  method      parameters        or some variation of it  depending on the particular implementation

User · Answer

I ve been asking myself related questions over and over again  then got lost in formal languages    but just to help you out a little I d like to share some findings   I recommend to give a look at advanced CMS   Typo3 for PHP   I know there is a lot of stuff but thats the one I think is most mature   Plone in Python  If you find out that the web in 2013 should work different then  start from scratch  That would mean to put together a team of highly skilled experienced people to build a new CMS  May be you d like to give a look at polymer for that purpose   If it comes to coding and multilingual websites   native language support  I think every programmer should have a clue about unicode  If you don t know unicode you ll most certainly mess up your data  Do not go with the thousands of ISO codes  They ll only save you some memory  But you can do literally everything with UTF-8 even store chinese chars  But for that you d need to store either 2 or 4 byte chars that makes it basically a utf-16 or utf-32   If it s about URL encoding  again there you shouldn t mix encodings and be aware that at least for the domainname there are rules defined by different lobbies that provide applications like a browser  e g  a Domain could be very similar like    ankofamerica com or bankofamerica com samesamebutdifferent     Of course you need the filesystem to work with all encodings  Another plus for unicode using utf-8 filesystem    If its about translations  think about the structure of documents  e g  a book or an article  You have the docbook specifications to understand about those structures  But in HTML its just about content blocks  So you d like to have a translation on that level  also on webpage level or domain level   So if a block doesn t exist its just not there  if a webpage doesn t exist you ll get redirected to the upper navigation level  If a domain should be completely different in navigation structure  then   its a complete different structure to manage  This can already be done with Typo3    If its about frameworks  the most mature ones I know  to do the general stuff like MVC buzzword I really hate it  Like  performance  If you want to sell something  use the word performance and featurerich and you sell    what the hell  is Zend  It has proven to be a good thing to bring standards to php chaos coders  But  typo3 also has a Framework besides the CMS  Recently it has been redeveloped and is called flow3 now  The frameworks of course cover database abstraction  templating and concepts for caching  but have individual strengths   If its about caching    that can be awefully complicated   multilayered  In PHP you ll think about accellerator  opcode  but also html  httpd  mysql  xml  css  js     any kinds of caches  Of course some parts should be cached and dynamic parts like blog answers shouldn t  Some should be requested over AJAX with generated urls  JSON  hashbangs etc   Then  you d like to have any little component on your website to be accessed or managed only by certain users  so conceptually that plays a big role    Also you d like to make statistics  maybe have distributed system   a facebook of facebooks etc  any software to be built on top of your over the top cms     so you need different type of databases inmemory  bigdata  xml  whatsoever   well  I think thats enough for now  If you haven t heard of either typo3   plone or mentioned frameworks  you have enough to study  On that path you ll find a lot of solutions for questions you haven t asked yet    If then you think  lets make a new CMS because its 2013 and php is about to die anyway  then you r welcome to join any other group of developers hopefully not getting lost   Good luck   And btw  how about people will not having any websites anymore in the future  and we ll all be on google   I hope developers become a little more creative and do something usefull to not be assimilated by the borgle        Edit     Just a little thought for your existing application   If you have a php mysql CMS and you wanted to embed multilang support  you could either use your table with an aditional column for any language or insert the translation with an object id and a language id in the same table or create an identical table for any language and insert objects there  then make a select union if you want to have them all displayed  For the database use utf8 general ci and of course in the front backend use utf8 text encoding   I have used url path segments for urls in the way you already explaned like   domain org en about you can map the lang ID to your content table  anyway you need to have a map of parameters for your urls so you d like to define a parameter to be mapped from a pathsegment in your URL that would be e g   domain org en about employees IT administrators   lookup configuration   pageid  url  1        about employees        1           about employees        map parameters to url pathsegment      parameterlist lang    array 0  gt  nl  1  gt  en       default nl if 0  parameterlist branch    array 1  gt  IT  2  gt  DESIGN       default nl if 0  parameterlist employertype    array 1  gt  admin  1  gt  engineer      could be a sql result    websiteconfig    userwhatever   websiteconfig    parameterlist   someparameterlist     array  branch   gt  someid    someparameterlist     array  employertype   gt  someid   function getURL  someparameterlist       todo foreach someparameter lookup pathsegment  return path      per say  thats been covered already in upper post   And to not forget  you d need to  rewrite  the url to your generating php file that would in most cases be index php

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