How do you manage different language versions of your site? Do you use some dynamic way to create pages, like PHP, and just pull the content from the database in specific language or do you use clean HTML pages where you keep different versions of the site in separate subfolders/subdomains?

I would think it would be better to try and build different static pages even use different domains such as mydomain.com and mydomain.dk so search engines can better list your site in the right places. You may have to have the registered nameserver appear to be in these different areas for the search engines to pick up on it but I'm not really sure about that.

In google webmaster tools you can add link to you multi local language websites. I am talking about it:

If your website is multi-language and .com is in example - english, so russain language will be .com/ru/ and you can add it too google, but not in yahoo Sitemam will be attached too if .com have it too.

When you have multi-language website, your website worth is bigger, because there is more content (pages, text,diferent languages)

There you can setup title, meta too.

So I think it depends from your needs. A?

When it comes to HTML I like the subfolder variant more, because PageRank is not passed from domain to subdomains. For PHP both doesn't matter. But I don't know PHP.

Personally id use PHP and the technique for this is fairly simple and there is no need at all to use a database for this. Instead the use of variables and PHP language files by which it means you can use variables such as “$mysitename” and within your index.php (example) you then rather than hardcode the text into the file instead you place the variable in its place for example

<?php echo $mysitename; ?>

To make more sense of this “my name is Joe blogs” could be replaced with “my name is <?php echo $mysitename; ?>” which would provide the same output though it will show whatever is held within the variable $mysitename.

You can then include the correct language file with the include function, more so you can go further to use a statement to check the location of the user and load a specific language by default. Though there are a number of tutorials on this easily found via google

http://php.about.com/od/advancedphp/qt/language_php.htm

hope that helps

I won't make multilingual versions of my sites at all because I want Google to get me only north america traffic. It may seem to get you more content, but at the same time dilutes the geo feature of your site.

I know I've seen some translations extensions for Joomla that might be worth a shot too.

I don't like Joomla that much. I had some disasters in the past with sites running on Joomla. I wonder if there are some plugins for Wordpress?

As far as im aware there is one built in and if not its almost just as easy to look for a template that uses language files, have a quick experiment and modify the technique for your own template if your unaware currently how to do so.

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly. I need this plugin that, for example, adds text editor boxes for translation in the edit post/page page. At the same time plugin can add language buttons to the site which visitor can use to choose his/her language version.

I've done this many times, and IMO the best way is to create separate language files or entries into a database for each language. Then you can let your visitors select their language, set it by the referring domain(as Joe mentioned), detect by their user agent, or all of the above.

While I've customized it quite a bit to add all these abilities, WHMCS has the basics build right in If you don't use WHMCS it's really not difficult for someone with even intermediate PHP experience.