multilanguage support revisited, best way?

I would like to hear what you think is the best way to server mulitlanguage support to users but and also make that language viewable by search engines so that you can get those key words (one language i offer is Japanese). At present I have different files for the whole site in mydomain.com/japan/ but the problem is when I update the look on the english side at just mydomain.com/ it doesn't update the other language parts.

Any technology can be used, but I perfer PHP. If you have example sites I can look at that would be great.

I have open base restrictions in effect or I would just buy mydomain.jp and use the same images off the other. All options ideas are welcomed.

Hey there. I just wrote a site in PHP that does exactly that. It has a display page ("show.php") which loads a design shell, loads a language file with all menu text and so on, and then loads a content file. It's not live for another couple weeks, so I can't show you until then. But try taking that idea. Here's the top of the display page...

All content files are named the same, with different languages in appropriately named directories. A page is viewed with the URL:
show.php?lang=japanese&page=privacy_policy
If no page or language is specified, it defaults to the english home page.

The final var, $display_page, is there for links. You can rename the "show.php" page and only have to change one var that way. And the language file is just a bunch of vars to be inserted into the design shell. Same thing with the content file.

Hope that helps.

-Jaeger

Thanks for the help. I will consider doing this. Only problem, I have probably 200-400+ dynamic URLs I will have to go an add &lang=$var to all of them I would love to be able to modrewrite the URL to japanese.domain.com and so forth but I'm not sure this can be done.