As having done this with sites, let me tell you it's pretty hard to do well. Maybe our site just did it wrong but we would tag all text as "translatable." If the user was viewing the site in english, no big deal we would just output what was inside the tags. If they were viewing it in another language, we would extract the translated data from dictionary files. You could do a dynamic bablefish here. With a good caching scheme, only the first viewer paid the price for translation.

No the hard part is how much to tag ... where to tag ... etc. Translating by sentences can lead to some really fractured paragraphs and translating at paragraphs can lead to some really fractured pages. Translations also play havoc with layout. A simple four letter word in language A can turn into a 40 character behemoth in language Z. Maybe better use of stylesheets could solve that problem.

So doable? Yes. Doable well? Probably not. Doable enough for speakers of other languages to understand? Yes. Doable enough for speakers of other languages to be wow-ed? Probably not.

-derby