G'day Bod,

I had to do this for $work about 20 years ago; I expect my memory is somewhat shaky on details by now. Here's what I remember as it applies to your general design. I believe there are now a number of applications which will do much of the heavy lifting; it may be better to use those instead of re-inventing wheels yourself. I'll be interested in what others suggest.

Firstly, just use one set of templates. Improve readability with meaningful id="...", class="...", etc. names; remember you can use multiple class names.

This seems to align with what you suggested as your first option. I don't see any MVC-violation; please explain more about what you meant.

Store translations in separate directories. If you're going to include language variations, store the main language (let's say fr for French) in one place, and then variations (e.g. fr_ca for Canadian-French) separately. The variations would be smaller and only need to overwrite parts of the main language. To use a Perl-based pseudocode (which isn't necessarily suggesting implemention):

%lang = (%lang_fr);              # French
%lang = (%lang_fr, %lang_fr_ca); # Canadian-French
[download]

Organise translations into useful categories. For instance, button text ("Submit", "Cancel", etc.) would be widely used and perhaps suitable for a "common" category; text specifically for the "Left-handed Sky Hooks" pages could probably go into their own category.

Bear in mind that scripts can be left-to-right (e.g. Cyrillic & Greek) while others are right-to-left (e.g. Arabic & Hebrew). Your overall layout design would need to take this into account. In some cases you could just the change direction of the text:

+-------------+  +-------------+
| LTR Lang    |  |    gnaL LTR |
| Description |  | noitpircseD |
+-------------+  +-------------+

Others may be a bit more complicated if controls need to be moved as well:

+---------+-----------+
| Prompt: | [_______] |
+---------+-----------+

+-----------+---------+
| [_______] | :tpmorP |
+-----------+---------+

There are other considerations related to scripts (e.g. fonts & encoding). I'd suggest having a "meta" (or similar) category for each language to hold this information.

Navigation of a multi-lingual site needs to be addressed. Here's a couple of examples of the types of issues that could be encountered:

• I follow links through several pages in Urdu; switch to Brazilian-Portugese; hit ←. Should I go back to the page in Urdu or should a see Brazilian-Portugese translation.
• I select a page in Swahili that's part of a set. I hit the "Next" button a few times to move through the set. On one page, there is no Swahili translation for the next page in the set. What happens? Hide the "Next" button? Show the next page in a fallback language? Print messages of remorse in various places? Pretend there's been a server error and hide under a rock?
  [the level of silliness creeping in is telling me that I've spent too much time answering this question]

As you can see, there's more involved than simply translating text.

Edit: A few cosmetic changes; no information added, deleted, or substantially changed.