Admin generator, filters and I18n

You need to modify your EntityFormFilter (where Entity is your object class - Article, Book, etc.).

Three easy steps

1) configure function
Add an input for each field you want to include in your filter

$this->widgetSchema['name']     = new sfWidgetFormFilterInput(array('with_empty' => false));
$this->validatorSchema['name']  = new sfValidatorPass(array('required' => false));

2) add a query modification when filtering for that field
I've done it for Doctrine. Pay atention to the method name addFIELDColumnQuery.

public function addNameColumnQuery(Doctrine_Query $query, $field, $values)
  {
    if (is_array($values) && isset($values['text']) && '' != $values['text'])
    {
      $query->leftJoin('r.Translation t') 
            // ->andWhere('t.lang = ?', $especify_one_language) // or it will search in all of them
            ->andWhere('CONCAT(t.name, t.shortname) like ?', '%' . $values['text'] . '%');
    }
  }

3) Add your searching fields

public function getFields()
  {
    return parent::getFields() + array('name' => 'Text');
  }

From: http://oldforum.symfony-project.org/index.php/t/24350/