title: Most efficient approach for multilingual PHP website
body: <p>I am working on a large multilingual website and I am considering different approaches for making it multilingual. The possible alternatives I can think of are:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>The <a href="http://se2.php.net/manual/en/function.gettext.php" rel="noreferrer">Gettext</a> functions with generation of .po files</li>
  <li>One MySQL table with the translations and a unique string ID for each text</li>
  <li>PHP-files with arrays containing the different translations with unique string IDs</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>As far as I have understood the Gettext functions should be most efficient, but my requirement is that it should be possible to change a text string in the original reference language (English) without the other translations of that string automatically reverting back to English just because a couple of words changed. Is this possible with Gettext?</p>
  
  <p>What is the least resource demanding solution?<br>
  Is using the Gettext functions or PHP files with arrays more or less equally resource demanding?<br>
  Any other suggestions for more efficient solutions?</p>