Approach to multilingual site

PHP
1

Hi All,

I’m about to start developing a PHP engine for a special site. It will be multilingual. I’ve done a few multilingual sites before but now I really need to hear Your opinion which approach would be better :

  1. with a MySql table with the translations and a unique string ID for each text
  2. one PHP file for each language with arrays containing the different translations with unique string IDs

There won’t be much text on the site at first but I’m almost certain it WILL expand in the future (maybe with more than 3 languages as well).
So what do you think guys, is it better (faster, more elegant, server-friendly, etc…) to store the translations in a database table and retrieve them when needed or use php files and include/require them on specific pages… ???

Your advice is HIGHLY appreciated - as always!

2

If the number of translations goes up your site will become slower if you use php arrays. Better to use a mysql table.