Posted by Denis Gerasimov on 04/08/05 09:48

Hello list,

I need to develop a multilingual web site and I am looking for the best way
of handling this task. There are three main issues I know:

1. Storing multilingual data in a database. Possible solutions I know:
a. many tables, one per each supported language, e.g. news_en, news_de.
b. one table having many columns with translations, e.g. (id, date, text_en,
text_de)
We use MySQL 4.1 as a back-end.

2. Multilingual HTML templates, possible solutions:
a. one generic template for everything, one per each language, like
contents_en.tpl.html, contents_de.tpl.html
b. many localized templates for each page, e.g news_en.tpl.html,
news_de.tpl.html
Template engine is Smarty.

3. Storing current language variable, possible solutions:
a. inside the URL like /en/news/
b. using cookies
c. using sessions
Web server is Apache2+mod_rewrite with PHP5

What are pros and cons for each solution? What are other possible solutions
for the above issues?

Best regards, Denis Gerasimov
Outsourcing Services Manager,
VEKOS, Ltd.
www.vekos.ru

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