Is there any way to build a multilingual website?

I wrote a website using Smarty, and now I want to add an English version. All text translations are stored in json, one json for the Chinese version and another json for the English version.

Now we are facing a problem:
The default language is obtained based on $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'], but in order to ensure that Chinese users use English operating systems (or vice versa), we hope to make an option to force language switching. I used COOKIE before, but there was a problem. Search engines could only see the default Chinese page and could not scan the English page.

Considering that the Chinese page would not move, the English page was changed to mydomain.com/en/. As a result, the tpl template in smarty was still in the root directory, and there were a lot of 404 errors when it was referenced.

In addition, the server does not support url routing (RewriteRule cannot be used), so the routing parameter transfer method will not work.

According to Google’s content guidelines, using get to pass parameters is not recommended, so using url get to pass parameters is no longer recommended.

The current problem is how to express the same website using two URLs as concisely as possible, with only the text rendering being different. URL routing cannot be used, and get parameters cannot be used.

I considered the third method, which is to make the Chinese version mydomain.com/zh/, but it feels stupid and the domain will be empty.

Reply content:

I wrote a website using Smarty, and now I want to add an English version. All text translations are stored in json, one json for the Chinese version and another json for the English version.

Now we are facing a problem:
The default language is obtained based on $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'], but in order to ensure that Chinese users use English operating systems (or vice versa), we hope to make an option to force language switching. It was done using COOKIE before, but there is a problem, that is, search engines can only see the default Chinese page and cannot scan the English page.

Considering that the Chinese page would not move, the English page was changed to mydomain.com/en/. As a result, the tpl template in smarty was still in the root directory, and there were a lot of 404 errors when it was referenced.

In addition, the server does not support url routing (RewriteRule cannot be used), so the routing parameter transfer method will not work.

According to Google’s content guidelines, using get to pass parameters is not recommended, so using url get to pass parameters is no longer recommended.

The current problem is how to express the same website using two URLs as concisely as possible, with only the text rendering being different. URL routing cannot be used, and get parameters cannot be used.

I considered the third method, which is to make the Chinese version mydomain.com/zh/, but it feels stupid and the domain will be empty.

https://www.microsoft.com/zh-cn
Actually, I don’t think it’s stupid = =After all, big companies are using it.

appleEnglish website apple.com, Chinese website is apple.com/cn.

I don’t know what framework you are using. I think you can add a filter to capture the /en/xxx request and fix the template positioning problem.