Language and site structure

How to design and organize the information.

[Felix]

Hello,

Organizations as IBM, Dell, ... have sites in different languages for different countries. When you look at the URLs of these sites, you always find something like: www.mysite.com/en/mypage.html or www.mysite.com/fr/mypage.html.

My question is: are they organizing their information in one main directory (root/en) for each language or are they using dynamic pages combined with a URL modifying engine?

Working with different directories seems to me the best solution if you take into account the indexing of your site by search engines but off course, it makes the maintenance of the site more difficult.

Can you help me and give me the good way to work on this matter?

Thanks.

[Eric_Jarvis]

I thought most of Dell's site was dynamically generated

ours isn't...though it is smaller...being multilingual doesn't make a difference to site maintainance except that you need to do some changes for each language...since however you work that it will need a translator and separate solutions for each language I don't see how a dynamically generated site gains much

[mivox]

All in all, you'd probably have better luck with this question in the Webmaster General forum [webmasterworld.com]... :)