Creating multilingual websites

There are numerous multilingual websites on the internet, most large multi-national companies have websites available in a few different languages. However, the most of these sites provide links for different languages, following a link takes you to a different document for each language. I found this technique to be quite undesirable due to the problem of maintaining these static documents, a time consuming process with the developers having to synchronise separate copies of the website. Furthermore, considering the dynamic nature of my website, I was loathe to create a static copy just for the purposes of translation. What I needed was a dynamic solution. This article describes the development of a framework which can be used to create dynamic, multilingual websites. With this system in place translators can login to the site and translate sections of text. The resulting translations are instantly live making this a truly dynamic solution.