Managing Gettext Translations on Shared Hosting

If you’re working for a big company, chances there are that sooner or later your employers will start to target the global market. With this ambition will come the need to translate the company’s website into one or more languages. Even if you don’t work for a big company, you may have a new service to launch in your native language (assuming you’re not a native English speaker) to target your local market, and in English for the global one. As developers, our role isn’t to translate texts but to prepare the website to support translations. The most popular method to do that in PHP is via Gettext. It’s a great method because it allows to separate translations from the application, enabling the parallelization of the process. The problem with it, is that Apache caches the translations, so unless you can restart the engine, any update to a translation file won’t be seen. This fact is particularly annoying if you work on a shared hosting where you don’t have administrator permissions. In this article, I’ll describe this issue in detail and explain the solution I found to avoid it.

Note: If you aren’t familiar with the concepts of I18N, translations, and Gettext, I strongly encourage you to read this series before exploring this article further. It will provide you with more details than the brief overview you’ll find here, and will help you have a better comprehension of these topics.

Setting up the Environment

There a lot of ways to use translations in PHP. The simplest one I can recall is to have an associative array containing all the translated strings and then use the keys to retrieve the right. As you may guess, this solution doesn’t scale well and should be avoided unless you’re working on a very very small project (perhaps something not longer than 5 lines of code). For serious translations we can use Gettext. This approach enables us to have different files for every targeted language which helps in maintaining separation between the business logic, the presentation layer, and the translations (which we can see as an add-on of the presentation layer). With Gettext, we can parallelize the process because while we’re working on some features of the website, translators can still work on translations using software like Poedit.

Translations should be stored in a path having a fixed structure. First of all, we’ll have a root folder named to your taste (for example “languages”). Inside it, we have to create a folder for every targeted language whose name must comply to the ISO 3166 standard. So, valid names for an Italian translation can be “it_IT” (Italian of Italy), “it_CH” (Italian of Switzerland), “us_US” (English of USA), and so on. Within the folder having the language code, we must have a folder named “LC_MESSAGES” where, finally, we’ll store the translation files.

Poedit, analyzing the source of the website, extracts the strings to translate based on one or more patterns we set in the software. It saves the strings in a single file having .po (Portable Object) as its extention that this software (or one equivalent) will compile into binary .mo file. The latter is the format of interest for us and for the PHP’s gettext() function. The .mo file is the one we must place inside the “LC_MESSAGES” directory we created earlier.

A sample code that uses gettext() is the following (the code is commented to give you a quick grasp of what it does):

<?php
   // The name of the root folder containing the translation files
   $translationsPath = 'languages';
       // The language into which to translate
       $language = 'it_IT';
   // The name of the translation file (referred as domain in gettext)
   $domain = 'audero';

   // Instructs which language will be used for this session
   putenv("LANG=" . $language); 
       setlocale(LC_ALL, $language);

   // Sets the path for the current domain
   bindtextdomain($domain, $translationsPath);
   // Specifies the character encoding
   bind_textdomain_codeset($domain, 'UTF-8');

   // Choose domain
   textdomain($domain);

   // Call the gettext() function (it has an alias called _())
   echo gettext("HELLO_WORLD"); // equivalent to echo _("HELLO_WORLD");
?>

Once you save the previous code in a page and load it in your browser, if gettext() is able to find the translation file, you’ll see the translations you made on the screen.

So far, so good. The bad news is that once a translation is loaded, Apache caches it. Therefore, unless we can restart the engine, any update to a tr

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