Correct Multi-Language Approach

[eluser]harbooz[/eluser]
Hello!

I am Koz, new to codeigniter and I am using it for a multilingual website with cms. I would really appreciate some documented or expert advice on this.

Introduction

The challenge of this website is that it needs to be available in 3 languages. I've first considered storing the current_language that the user has chosen in a session, but in this case the url's would not be search engine friendly and only one the default language would be indexed. (I am using segmented uri's)

So the structure I've implemented until now looks like this:

I have 3 controllers, one for each language, called "en", "fr", "it". Each controller contains functions corresponding to the pages/views. This way, by changing the first segment, I can switch to a new language. The URI looks like this:

Code:

myurl.com/index.php/en/portfolio/branding/project_name

Questions

1. Is this a correct way to approach the language change, in order for the site to be search engine friendly? If not, what would be the best method?

2. If this method is OK, what problems I may encounter during development. I'm thinking I may get to a stage when some things will get tricky (contact forms, etc), because of using the first segment for the language instead of a page controller.

Thank you!

Best Regards,
Koz

Later Edit: The text in various languages comes from the DB, not from language files