The PHP Magazine has a nice link this morning to a thread on the NyPHP mailing list about creating multilingual sites and some of the problems that might arrise.

It seeks to find answers to these questions: How do you handle multilingual sites? Do you tend to store data in text files, in a database, or some other way? Do you maintain different entire databases for each language, or different tables in the same database, or just different columns in the same table(s)?

Some of the replies to this message have brought out some interesting responses, including: creating records in a separate table, one for each translation of a document, using valid locales as your language codes so that you can use them with strftime() to format dates, and the GNU gettext library. It's interesting stuff, and with the web growing smaller every day, not everyone should be forced to use English (though it is rapidly becoming the "international language")...