A better language library

[eluser]esra[/eluser]
[quote author="Negligence" date="1198176076"]If you've ever had to develop multi-lingual applications before, and perform translations, you would come to appreciate having english, french, etc., language strings in a single file, instead of finding/replacing in two different files in two different directories.[/quote]

The problem with this approach comes when you need to deal with multiple translators. We generally supply an English version of our language files and database tables to a language translation house which uses independent translators who then return their completed work for review cycles. By placing the strings for multiple languages in a single file, you either need to manually transfer the translations to one central language file (labor intensive) or need to incrementally pass the same file around between multiple translators (prone to mistakes and a slow process).

Lastly, this approach is not very extensible in a modular sense because the files containing the arrays need to be manually edited each time a new language is added. Using the existing approach, one only needs to add a directory with a new set of language files for the desired locale.