Need advice on how-to multi-lingual site

[transistor]

Hi everyone,
My site is currently in spanish and I need to make it multilingual. I want to make it easy to add a new language.
The site is 99% dynamic and the contents are related to music, therefore I really don't need to translate de dynamic content, but the static content (like "Nombre" to "Name", "comprar" to "buy", etc.) from 3 specific pages: artist, album and song.
So far I have considered two alternatives:

1- Make a template that is filled with variables of the static values that with the appropiate include would give the right language.

2- Make a copy of each of the 3 pages and translate the static content, then call the appropiate page depending on the language required.

To date, aquiring domains for each language is not possible.

Do you have any suggestion, comment, tip or hint on the best way to do this?

Note: not sure if this thread belongs to this forum, please rellocate if necessary.

[jatar_k]

Interesting question transistor.

I would go with version 2. Since there are only 3 pgs you will cut down the time it takes to serve a page since the static content is translated. Otherwise it is just a bunch more processing that needs to be done.

If there were 100 pgs I would go with the first option and create fully dynamic, language independant templates.

All of the french/english sites I have worked on always had en/ and fr/ in the urls. It split at the root level. I don't know if this is the best way but it was very simple to work with.

If I had to make a change to
www.somesite.com/en/dir/page.html

I could easily find it's brother at
www.somesite.com/fr/dir/page.html

Just a thought.