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I am currently building an HTML web site and i need the make it multilingual ... so i was asking what are the best solutions?

Should I use sub domains http://en.mysite.com, or make it simple, e.g.:

mysite.com/en/index.htm -

mysite.com/fr/index.htm

Should I translate everything for all language or are there tools to auto translate?

Finally, how can I make the website detect the users location and redirect him to his language?

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Sherif
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  • CMS packages like drupal and wordpress have plugins that do this for you automatically. Minus the part about auto translation. No telling what kind of mess you'd end up with there – Kai Qing Feb 28 '14 at 00:24
  • In theory, you could use something like the Google Translate API (https://developers.google.com/translate/) to auto-translate, if you had the financial resources (it's not free). But yeah, I agree with iandotkelly about the mess that you could get from an auto-translation service. – Mark Feb 28 '14 at 00:55

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Generally, I would say to have higher rank in search engines it might be better to avoid subdomains.

Since you only have HTML, the redirection solutions are not good enough to consider them. For instance if someone decide to visit English version from Paris, to avoid annoying redirections you might need to keep track of this choice by cookies. Instead of redirection you can still suggest a language for them (according to their location). It's possible by google loader: https://developers.google.com/loader/

Mehdi
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    To add to the point about redirecting, It's not always reliable, based on my office IP address alot of services say I'm in Singapore when I'm in Sydney, Australia. – Jon P Feb 28 '14 at 00:33
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You could use /your/path?lang=en.

To detect the users language, see: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8199791/1500022

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Sascha Wedler
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