When upgrading from a previous release to Zend Framework 1.8 or higher you should note the following migration notes. As translated segments were introduced into the new standard route, the '@' character is now a special character in the beginning of a route segment. To be able to use it in a static segment, you must escape it by prefixing it with second '@' character. The same rule now applies for the ':' character. As with Zend Framework 1.8 a default caching was added. The reason behind this change was, that most users had performance problems but did not add caching at all. As the I18n core is a bottleneck when no caching is used we decided to add a default caching when no cache has been set to Zend_Locale. Sometimes it is still wanted to prevent caching at all even if this decreases performance. To do so you can simply disable caching by using the disableCache() method.