There are a few steps you need to take to con­fig­ure poedit to work with a Zend Frame­work project prop­erly. I will take you through the con­fig­u­ra­tion process step by step, and in the end you should have a work­ing instal­la­tion.
In this tuto­r­ial we are on Win­dows, but the process is the same on Mac & Linux based sys­tems, and poedit even looks much the same on all platforms.

A recur­ring prob­lem for site devel­op­ers is imple­ment­ing a solid way to cre­ate and main­tain mul­ti­lin­gual sites, this arti­cle series is my fee­ble attempt to guide you through how to quickly imple­ment the Zend_Translate in an Zend Frame­work 1.9.x site.
The pro­ce­dures and best prac­tices for this is unfor­tu­nately like train­ing a dog, every­one has a dif­fer­ent way of doing it and an opin­ion, so the meth­ods and code I show here are take out of appli­ca­tions that are run­ning in pro­duc­tion so if you have a bet­ter way of doing it please feel free to comment!.

You will notice that once you have started trans­lat­ing an appli­ca­tion using poedit it’s quite a smooth process, what ham­pers the expe­ri­ence a lit­tle bit is the muti­tude of ways you can write code in Zend Frame­work, this is great in every way for devel­op­ers, but requires a bit of think­ing when you need to also trans­late all the UI strings.
So how do we make poedit detect the strings while mak­ing our code pretty?

As an update to the method of hav­ing every­thing related to Zend_Translate and Zend_Locale in the Boot­strap, here is an alter­na­tive using an Con­troller Plu­gin that does the grunt work of val­i­dat­ing, select­ing and updat­ing the Zend_Locale, Zend_Registry & Zend_Session using Zend_Session_Namespace. And we are using poedit .po & .mo files as the source as usual.