I want to use zenphoto in my applications, but the most problem is i18n. I wait too many months but I think this part of project will not start since 2009.
I wanted to know is it harder than use _e() function for each string and a little changes in config for choosing language?
and If I want to start translating is there any suggestion for me?

This part of the project is already started and even if our roadmap on trac says it will be in 1.3. that will happen much earlier. I can't be more exact on that right now. Please keep in mind we are all volunteers and work on zp in our spare time.

Thanks acrylian, I know that, Thanks a lot for your work on zp in your spare time.

Out of curiosity, is the plan to do i18n of just the "published" elements - ie the themes and the few functions that output text to them, or of the entire zenphoto package (including admin pages)?

The focus is on the admin pages, but we think of including the five included standard themes as well.

That's great. There's not too much text on the themes, and I think it'd be a shame not to include them - but it might be an idea to leave a base/default theme without the overhead introduced.

I'm a native English speaker and my gallery's really only for friends/family/tinkering so it's not something I'm likely to use on my ZP install, but I'm interested in seeing the process of internationalisation as it might be useful in another project I'm thinking of.

Yeah, that's exactly why we think about the themes. It's not that hard to change that if one needs it.
By the way, I am not a native English speaker myself, I am German, so I can certainly see the need of internationalisation for people who are not that comfortable with english. The native language often feels simply more like home...:-)

Once, if it’s done, will the date-functions preserve the settings and display German month names, if i select german as language? Btw. there is a php function setlocale() but zenphoto ignores, if i set the locale with this :(

Yes, of course the dates will be shown correctly then. The setlocale() doesn't work because we currently use the date() function for the dates and to get this working we will have to use strftime() that is a little different. Another possibility is that your server doesn't support a german locale.

By the way, you will only be able to select a language if there is a translation for it (of course German will be there...:-)).

Ah ;) tnx4info, and yes: My server supports German, i know this very clear. If you need support translating zenphoto to German, let me know, i'm good in German (yep, but only because this is my native language g) :)

Right, of course, a German server should support the German locale... Thanks for the offer, but I'll just do German myself (developer's advantage...:-)), since German will be the test language anyway.

Will there be Language files as Plaintext, or will there be MO Files?

We will use php-gettext, so there will be MO files.