Most efficient way to do language file in PHP?

Question

Questions Updated instead of making a new question...

I really want to provide a few alternative languages other then English on my social network s

Answer 1

An extension to the answers above whom deserve the credit - I'm just posting as maybe this will also be useful to someone else who ends up here.

I personally prefer the key to the array to be the actual phrase in my mother tongue (in my case English) rather than a CONSTANT_VALUE because:

• I find it easier to read the code when the text is in my native language rather than having to remember what a CONSTANT_VALUE actually outputs
• It means no lookup is needed to return the phrase for visitors who also use my naitive language (giving marginally better performance)
• It's one less list of values to maintain

The downside is that it's harder to spot missing values in other languages as you don't necessarily have a master list anymore - I also log a warning from the abstract method so that I spot any missing values.

I implemented as:

• An abstract class with static methods for outputting the text value (using late static binding)
• A concrete class for each language: English overriding the method to return the phrase without translation, other languages overriding the list of phrases so that a translated phrase is returned

     'Nombre',
            'Registered Email' => 'Correo electrónico registrado',
            'Surname' => 'Apellido'
        );
    }

Usage:

    $language = new \Language\Spanish();
    echo $language::output('Forename'); // Outputs: Nombre

    $language = new \Language\English();
    echo $language::output('Registered Email'); // Outputs: Registered Email