Best approach to handle languages in an app

[eluser]Dani[/eluser]
Im thinking about the same topic myself. Problem with your first method is that it is very cumbersome to add a new language and also lots of work to manually translate each fields, names, paragraphs, items, text etc to all languages. You could also do like Wikipedia, but problem there is that texts across languages are totally independent. Another approach I've been thinking about is to make use of Bing Translation API. If you have facebook and have seen friends from other countries writing a status message, you'll notice they've added that translate feature. The pros with this method is that all texts are synchronized and translations are done with no work. Problem with this approach is that the translations are only decent. Translations will probably get better and better, but there _will_ sometimes be a need to manually correct a translation (because a sentence in a given language may have multiple meanings), and I'm not sure if Bing Translation API can collaborate with custom mods. And even if the translations were great, you'd still have to call the translate() function quite a lot of times (for each parts of your site that you want to have translated, i.e. the header, menu, text....).