How to cope with an multi language system with pulldowns?

I have builded an system with php an MySQL. This has been set as multi language, so each user can choose it's own language. How do I work with pulldowns?

Most of these menus are generated from the database. How would you make this work for an multi language开发者_StackOverflow system?

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The database generated string would simply be used as a parameter to gettext, which would then chose a translated string if one was available for the selected language. If one isn't available, it would default to the provided string.