The PHP manual is available not only in various formats, but
also in various languages. The text of the
manual is first written in English, then teams of people across
the world take care of translating it to their native languages.
If a translation for a specified function or chapter has not yet
been made, the manual's build system falls back to the
English version of it.
People involved in the translations start from the XML
source code available from http://cvs.php.net/
and from it they translate to their mother language. They do
not use the HTML, the plain text,
or the PDF version. It is the build system which takes
care of the conversions from XML to human readable formats.
Note:
If you would like to help translate the documentation to your native
language, please get in touch with the translation/documentation team by
subscribing to the phpdoc mailing list: send an empty mail to phpdoc-subscribe@lists.php.net.
The mailing list address is phpdoc@lists.php.net. State in the
message that you are interested in translating the manual to a language
and someone will get back to you, helping you start a new language translation
or reach the already active documentation team for your language.
At the moment the manual is available, partly or not, in the following languages:
Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Hong Kong Cantonese), Chinese (Traditional), Czech,
Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese,
Korean, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and
Turkish.
They can all be downloaded here: http://www.php.net/docs.php.