.net MVC culture

Question

What's the best approach to develop multilanguage MVC web application?. What I envision is having a drop down with several language preferences on the master page. Selecting the language option would change the site's language/culuture.

The site would also use a different suffix for each language option. for example selecting a language would also redirect the site to the same domain with that language/country's suffix.

US => domain.com Canada => domain.ca France => domain.fr Poland => domain.pl

thanks

Answer 1

Having a drop down to select language/culture is a good way to go. Selecting a value would then set the UICulture and probably save the value (in session) for future use.

Selecting a different site domain however is likely to cause problems - unless you really want to direct users to a completely different website for each language. For example, any cookies or login information will be separate between websites. The biggest issue however, where you need to allow for language variations within a country. Your scheme would be unable to differentiate between Canada-English and Canada-French. Similarly, across Europe there are many different language/culture combinations.

If you want to utilise language settings in the MVC routing, consider including the language-culture combination within every url. somethiing like : domain.com/en-gb/, domain.com/fr-ca/ etc.

Answer 2

Do you care about SEO? If so different URLs for different language versions of your page are a very good idea. (i.e. don't store it in a session or other unlikely to be crawled way).

If you can get the domains with the relevant suffixes, while it probably won't guarantee better SEO rankings, I would expect it would probably help.