Multi-language database driven site

Hello,

I’m about to start an ecommerce site which needs to be available in several languages. The client doesn’t want any software translation, so I’ll need all of the content in the database in every language.

I originally thought about using a cookie to signal to the page which language it should display, but search engine spiders don’t accept cookies and I think that it’s important to get the site indexed in every language.

Any ideas?

Cheers,

Jon

I’m sure there are some well defined best practices for this sort of thing, but what about using the URI structure to indicate language?

http://www.example.com/en-GB/view/product/5.html

With a drop down for language selection, I would guess a spider would crawl the links made available to it.

Again, you may want to investigate some best practices before taking my world for it! :wink:

I noticed one of our resident i18n/l10n gurus is active, maybe he’ll chip-in.