Pardon me if this has been answered before but I have been asked to provide a site in multiple languages:

My understanding is:

• localisation will allow the use of various languages on a site based on the locale of the logged in user. This will display all the default DNN stuff in the appropriate language.
• No content is translated

Is there a recommended approach to providing a site in various languages? Assuming the default language is English I may wish to provide a couple of links at the top of a page to the sams site in say Spanish, French and German.

One method of achieving this is to create sub domains in each language pointing to a portal for each language.

e.g.: 

• mydomain.com/en
• mydomain.com/es
• mydomain.com/fr
• mydomain.com/dk

This creates maintenance and user registration issues but may be acceptable on small sites.

An alternative may be to include a language key in each db table allowing for the storing of the content in different languages. In this case if there was a translated version of the module content it would be displayed otherwise the default language content would be displayed. (Major core changes would be required for this and it would require changes to all modules - Doh!) Is there an easier way?

HtmlText for example would become:

ModuleID
LanguageID
DesktopHtml
DesktopSummary
CreatedByUser
CreatedDate
DateLastUpdated

To assist maintenance in attempting to ensure that the various language versions were in sync a report could be produced showing

Module   ---   Language   ---   DateLastUpdated etc

I just recently helped implement a solution for a friend of mine who wanted to display content in vietnamese as well as english -- he ended up using the tailored text/html module.

This was a good solution for him because all of the content that he wanted to display was already in a Text/HTML module.  This may also work for you,  depending on your requirements.

I hear it is a little tedious setting up each instance of the module because you need to provide one entry for each language and also for "authenticated" and "unauthenticated" users -- so you are entering the content four times (twice in each language, twice for each "mode") -- but the functionality it provides is spot-on.......

Hope that helps,