HELP: Language Switching?

[night-at-the-musian]

I'm working with some native Spanish speakers to translate my site into LatAm Spanish. Currently, I have a separate page where I keep all the translations; but I would like the option for a viewer to select the translation as part of a dropdown menu, a la Neopets, and their selection would carry across all pages. I've been trying to search for bits and pieces, but I haven't found a proper tutorial or method for getting it all together.

So! Any tips, tutorials, or suggestions on how to do this? Or will I need to make new pages with something in the URL, for example "site/esp/page.html"? All help is appreciated!!

[Melooon]

Static HTML sites don't make this easy    You could have a Javascript that selects blocks of text and changes the text based on someone's language selection, but you'd have to custom code every piece of text or build quite a complex system of naming blocks of text and matching each block to a translation entry.. that's not impossible but is kinda a big job (I don't recommend this)

Neopets works using PHP, which means the pages are programaticly generated based on your preferences, that's a totally different technology (and it would still require quite a bit of work to setup; worth it for a complex site but not a small one).

If the translation is a primary focus for ur site then the best solution is just to have separate HTML pages for each language version of a page, make sure they all use a standard structure and use shared CSS to theme them all ^^ That not much fun to do, but its the best static solution. You can speed it up a lot if you use a static site generator like 11ty; 11ty takes a bit of learning, but I would say it's worth it if you have many pages and it's a good way to handle this.

[wygolvillage]

One section of my site switches what text displays in certain places via a style switcher (code I used is linked here) but to do that it would mean putting ALL of the text content of your site into your stylesheets and determining it via span class or span id, which honestly seems even harder than just making separate pages....