I have done such, and for many years now, in fact. You can see how I implemented it here:
You will see the Japanese site first, because we are a Japanese company based in Japan whose primary language is Japanese. but you can clearly see the “ENGLISH” button in all caps at the rightmost side of the menubar. Click that and you will be taken to the English page (of course).
But I’ve done the other pages in the site a bit differently than other web designers do it. Most other bi-lingual sites I’ve seen offer a language button on every page, but clicking it usually launches them back to the home page. On my site, clicking the language on most of the pages will take you to that same page in the other language. The convenience of that is that the user will not need to dig down into the site again to get to that same page.
NOTE: If the layout of my Japanese site looks a tad different from my English site, it’s only because I recently updated my Japanese site and have not yet had time to update my English site.
TIP: To make my job easier in Freeway, I use Master Pages. In the past, I had a single CSS Menubar on the Master, which propagated to each page. I recently ditched that for something better. What I do now is have two CSS Menubars, but they display as a single menubar. The left side contains the majority of buttons you see, but the separate CSS Menubar is the “ENGLISH” button. Why make it separate? Because I the URL applied to that button will vary by page, and I don’t want to change only that one link and then have my entire CSS Menubar delinked from the Master. So by using two separate CSS Menubars, I keep the main menubar linked to the Master and the only thing that gets delinked is the ENGLISH language button.
Thanks for the in depth information. Sounds like you’ve implemented some good ideas.
No matter how you cut it, it looks like quite a bit of work.
Hopefully I won’t have to get into that all just yet. I’m planning for what has already been asked for but I know we’re not doing it initially. English first, then other languages at a later date.
As you can see, I’ve got a big commercial site with lots of pages. To keep everything speedy and easy to change, I’ve long kept the English site separated from the Japanese site, in two different Freeway documents. I even went a step beyond that by breaking our “VISION” site (click the VISION button to see it) into it’s own two Freeway documents, on English and the other Japanese. That’s because the VISION site is so big and detailed we created a separate domain name just for it.
So in total, I have 4 Freeway documents to manage all our company’s sites.
These two sites ( the 1st one still being worked on) are in two languages. Built first in French then the site duplicated and the translated text pasted in. Once in the preferred language you stay there with the option of going back to the sister page in the other language
Maybe Google Translate is good enough for European language conversions, but for conversion between English and Japanese… Wow. If I used that, my web visitors would be left saying, “What the HELL!!!” (HELL as in Gehenna, not Hades.)