I've written a website in PHP / mySQL which is a database driven multi language site. On arrival you are presented the content in English, but changing the country flag at the top shows the content in that language. You can also access different languages by adding /fr, /de, /es etc at the end of the domain name. The scripting sees this and returns the language version accordingly.

It's all controlled from one CMS, and the content for the site is all dynamically driven - there are no language specific pages, they are all the same pages drawing in different content.

For European languages this all works very well. However, looming on the horizon I can see Arabic and Mandarin versions coming. This is all new to me and they are quite different from anything I've done before.

Has anyone any experience of this? It's more of the encoding of the page issue that I'm thinking about. Can you encode the same page for two completely different alphabets?

Thanks.