How to best manage multi-lingual presentations?

Question

I have a presentation done in Latex+Beamer, currently in french. I also need to make the same presentation, with the same structure, in dutch. I'd like to maintain the presentation in one file, so that if I want to change the structure of it, I only have to do it in one place. What's the best way to put the translations outside of the presentation file?

I thought of defining a command for each text element to be present in the slides, and having a different command definition for each language. But it seems quite heavy....

Thanks in advance

RAph

Answer 1

I'd do

\newcommand{\en}{#1}
\newcommand{\de}{}

And in the text use:

\en{ my text in english }
\de{ german text }

And after I'd simply swap the commands. Be aware that result should be different only because the text should take more or less space. You can cheat a bit using \phantom command. This solution use only one file though.

Answer 2

keep each slide in its own file... then \input{dutch-file} \input{french-file}