Well I would just pass the language model into the view - it seems the better method (and still in keeping with MVC methodology).

This is what I do with Kohana (a similar framework to cakePHP).

Umm if you have hard coded text (i.e. if that text never changes) why dont you just write it into the model? That seems perfectly fine (unless CakePHP does something screwy with views I dont know about :)) in MVC terms.