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: The Gettext functions with generation of .po files One MySQL table with the translations and a unique string ID for each text PHP-files with arrays containing the different translations with unique string IDs 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? What is the least resource demanding solution? Is using the Gettext functions or PHP files with arrays more or less equally resource demanding? Any other suggestions for more efficient solutions?