Nio’s Weblog

Build Multi-lingual Websites With the Zend Framework

I've been lucky enough to have my book, "Beginning PHP and MySQL 5, Second Edition", translated into several languages, among them Chinese, Czechoslovakian, Polish and Russian. Further, the English version is available via a variety of outlets in many other countries, France and Germany among them. While my ability to effectively promote the book within these markets is largely negated due to the obvious geographical barriers, the book's support site presents a great opportunity to at least communicate with these readers in their native language.

Of course, despite my best attempts I'm unable to speak this array of languages, but as a Web developer I wanted to create the most efficient means for hosting a multi-lingual support site, and then work with native speakers to translate the English material. Because the support site runs the Zend Framework, naturally I wondered whether some sort of translation component was available, and sure enough a quick perusal of the Zend Framework website turned up Zend_Translate. In this brief tutorial I'll document how I'm using the Zend Framework to make my website available to the world. [....]