Anybody familiar with coding French/English websites?

A client wants me to add a ';French-only'; section of an English website. Would it be easier to:


-copy all the English pages and change the text? It'd make future design changes more difficult because I'd have to make each change twice.


-or install a cookie/session that could pull the appropriate text from the database based on the English/French decision? Then there'd only be 1 set of pages and future design changes would only need to happen once.


-or something else?Anybody familiar with coding French/English websites?
I'd use something similar to the above answer. But I'd use a more sensible table structure...


Use a table with ID, languageCode, text. You can then have a separate table containing the possible languageCodes ( to use as a foreign key ).


This would allow you to add languages as you want ( just a new record in your languageCode table ) and wouldn't need database changes. The data in your text table would need one row per item per language.


Then when you want the translations for a particular language, then something select text from languageText where languageCode = 'xxxxx'.Anybody familiar with coding French/English websites?
I have done several multi-lingual sites. In each case:


- A database table: id, en, fr, pt


- an entry: ';BUY';, ';Buy Now!';, ';Achetez Maintenant';, ';Compra J脿!';


- The global value ';$Lang'; (ie ';en';, ';fr';, ';pt';) by default ';en'; (english), and selected at a click of a flag, resets the global, saves in a cookie.


- A call in Php:


echo ( ';%26lt;img src=\';xxx\'; alt = \'; . p_text(';BUY';) . \'; %26gt;'; );


- The function p_text($id) {


$sql = ';select `';.$Lang.';` from `dbtexts` where `id`='';.$id.';' limit 1';;


$list = mysql_query($sql);


$lst = mysql_fetch_array($list);


$txt = $lst[0];


return(htmlentities($txt)); =%26gt; to display 脿, 锚, 莽, 卯 etc...


}


The function selects the column in the table according to $lang and return the text.





Warnings:


- Texts in French are about 12% longuer than in english! Make sure you have a liquid layout...


- English has no accentuation, French has: 脿, 茅, 锚 etc... won't show properly if you do not use htmlentities() in Php.





And example of multi-lingual: http://www.lobidauctions.com


It has two languages, but the table is in 6 languages (en, fr, pt, es, it, de). I just have to add the flags to get the other languages, or add a new column in the table to add another languages..

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