Multiple languages web site and strategy

[cfmtravel]

Hi guys

I would like to have your opinion about having a multiple languages website.

I currently have an English website (some sort of directory) that I can easily transform into other languages (I'm writing perfectly in Italian (mother tongue) and French).

The question is it better to use the same site and create some directory like "it" or "es" or "fr" or buying different domain names for each language (using the same database with all the data of course)?
I wish I could target properly the ad units that adsense will display in the future.

I hope to have some good advice from people with a better experience then mine.

Thanks a lot

[Narsto]

Being able to cater to visitors from all over the world is nice. I think you don't need to buy new domains for each, a sub-directory will suffice. I guess it's just me being practical as I don't see any advantage of having to buy domains for each.

[Kendo]

Buying a whole bunch of different domains for each language is not only expensive, but near impossible because some require that the owner, webhost or at least the DNS server be in that country.

So what I did was:
- ar.site.com
- cn.site.com
- eg.site.com
- etc

I have them all pointing to the same site, except that each page checks the requested URL and/or user's language and then redirects to the relative page:

- default_cn.asp
- default_en.asp
- default_fr.asp
- etc

Instead of checking stats for a lot of different sites and seeing 10-50 unique visitors per day, I now check one set of stats and see 500 unique users per day.

The contact form is similarly in 20+ languages and I do get lots of non-english enquiries, but dousing their message in Google Translate sorts that and our replies in English are usually understood.

[cfmtravel]

Thanks guys

I'm heading towards the direction of the sub directory for each language.

There is one thing that makes me worried. The web site use htaccess for url rewriting, I will have to use different rules for the different languages. Do you think is possible to create a physical directory for each language it es pt cn and so on, and inside place the htaccess for that language and all the pages that will display the contents in that specific language?

Thanks again