Welcome to the Cookbook

To change or set the language for your application, all you need to do is the following:

Configure::write('Config.language', 'fre');

1. Configure::write('Config.language', 'fre');

This tells Cake which locale to use (if you use a regional locale, such as fr_FR, it will use the ISO 639-2 locale as a fallback if it doesn't exist), you can change the language at any time, e.g. in your bootstrap if you're setting the application default language, in your (app) controller beforeFilter if it's specific to the request or user, or in fact anytime at all before you want a message in a different language.

It's a good idea to serve up public content available in multiple languages from a unique url - this makes it easy for users (and search engines) to find what they're looking for in the language they are expecting. There are several ways to do this, it can be by using language specific subdomains (en.example.com, fra.example.com, etc.), or using a prefix to the url such as is done with this application. You may also wish to glean the information from the browser’s user-agent, among other things.

As mentioned in the previous section, displaying localized content is done using the __() convenience function, or one of the other translation functions all of which are globally available, but probably be best utilized in your views. The first parameter of the function is used as the msgid defined in the .po files.

Remember to use the return parameter for the various __* methods if you don't want the string echo'ed directly. For example:

<?php
echo $form->error(
    'Card.cardNumber',
    __("errorCardNumber", true),
    array('escape' => false)
);
?>

1. <?php
2. echo $form->error(
3. 'Card.cardNumber',
4. __("errorCardNumber", true),
5. array('escape' => false)
6. );
7. ?>

If you would like to have all of your validation error messages translated by default, a simple solution would be to add the following code in you app_model.php:

function invalidate($field, $value = true) {
	return parent::invalidate($field, __($value, true));
}

1. function invalidate($field, $value = true) {
2. return parent::invalidate($field, __($value, true));
3. }

The i18n console task will not be able to determine the message id from the above example, which means you'll need to add the entries to your pot file manually (or via your own script). To prevent the need to edit your default.po(t) file every time you run the i18n console task, you can use a different domain such as:

function invalidate($field, $value = true) {
	return parent::invalidate($field, __d('validation_errors', $value, true));
}

1. function invalidate($field, $value = true) {
2. return parent::invalidate($field, __d('validation_errors', $value, true));
3. }

This will look for $value in the validation_errors.po file.

There's one other aspect of localizing your application which is not covered by the use of the translate functions, and that is date/money formats. Don't forget that CakePHP is PHP :), therefore to set the formats for these things you need to use setlocale.

If you pass a locale that doesn't exist on your computer to setlocale it will have no effect. You can find the list of available locales by running the command $locale -a in a terminal.