Multi language, how to approach this?

Question

Hi everyone,
I have a website on which I want to offer multi language, but no idea what is the best way to do this.
There 2 plans I have:
1:
Of course all content (text) is in a database.
If a user would want a different language, the user would click on a link/flag, this would put the requested language in a session variable, for example: session.language = "es"
In the database I would have 2 columns (every language has 1 column) and then select the text which belongs to 'es'
Every page would then do a request to the database to get the text beloging to the session.language.
PROS: Relatively simple to implement
CONS: SEO wise I don't think this could be very good. http://www.domain.com/page.cfm would give an english text or spanish text (or other language). Google will not add duplicate URL's
2:
Do something with http://www.domain.com/en/page.cfm for english and http://www.domain.com/es/page.cfm for english.
With a URL rewrite rule the language value in the URL http://www.domain.com/en/page.cfm would actually be a page http://www.domain.com/page.cfm?language=en
The url.language variable will then select the correct language from the database.
PROS: Unique URL for each language. Good for SEO and Google indexing.
CONS: A bit more difficult to implement. (I think)
Or does anyone have other / better ideas?
Thanks!!

Answer 1

You kind of mix two different considerations partially in your two options here: how to identify the language (mentioned in both points), and how the data is stored (only mentioned in the first one).
We use the second approach for identifying which language site one is on, except we use a subdomain instead of an element in the path (eg: we have es.domain.com, fr.domain.com etc, rather than www.domain.com/es/ and www.domain.com/fr/).  However I think that's neither here nor there.  The rewrite is simple to set up, and a one-off, so there's no real penalty there.
As for how the data is stored, we've got a bit of a hotch-potch depending on which text it is.  Structural stuff which is fairly static (eg: in the breadcrumbs the text saying "You are here") we have in .properties files.  Slightly more frequently "managed" text like SEO-sensitive stuff is stored in a slightly different text-file-based system, due to who maintains said content.  Other (more volatile) content still is managed via a CMS.  This is basically down to which dept manages which text (as well as legacy issues like different people having different ideas as to how things ought to be done,if I'm honest).  The text-file-based stuff is loaded once at app-start-up, and the DB-stored stuff is called as necessary (with some CF & DB-side caching depending on what it is).
The text-file-based stuff is applied to a page in the way Steve suggests.  The DB stuff is just output as per normal fetched-query content.
You might want to read up on how Java handles this sort of thing, to get a fairly coherent picture of an accepted / standardised approach to such things.  Start with http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/ResourceBundle.html and google "java ResourceBundle".
Adam