I am curious if there are standards or best practices when it comes to designing multilingual web sites. The issues involved are ease of maintainanance, robustness, and adhering to accessibity standards.
The approaches I can think of are:
1) having a different set of static HTML pages in subdirectories for each language supported.
2) replace the text using variables populated from a database or XML file.
3) (thanks to Nikita the Spider) a combination where a nightly job generates the static pages from the database.
Generating static HTML pages can sometimes be one approach to addressing performance issues, but I can't think why you would do this just because your site displays content in multiple languages.
Making your site database-driven is certainly the way to go, but you need to be careful of how this is implemented. Substituting a single word, for example, such as in the sentence: "The population of [country] is [value]", won't cut it. In other languages, the entire sentence structure differs (e.g. German) or words join together (e.g. French). Asian languages such as Mandarin or Arabic are a whole issue again.
The best way for a particular site might depend on the other requirements of it.
For example, I am working on a large multi-lingual Flex RIA. There is an accompanying web site and several administration back ends written in ColdFusion. The admin areas are only in English, but the information entered using the back end might be in any language that the system supports.
The database structure is split - each main item in the system has a single record which stores the generic information for that item that does not change based on language - phone number or price for example - and then multiple separate records for the textual information for each item, one in each language. The idea being that if a particular language is not available for a particular item, the English version is shown instead, which is an acceptable solution for the kind of site that it is.
However, the front end of the website has static information and the site owners want a large degree of control over the look of it, so those pages are static html, managed in Adobe Contribute. The main menu uses resource bundles to handle the display of navigation in the current langauage, but separate static files are created for each content page in each language (because the site owner can easily do this as he wishes with Contribute). Some ColdFusion trickery is used to find the equivalent page in another language when the user uses the switcher widget.
That's the 2 minute overview - there were a lot of factors that influenced the final setup and I could go on for hours! The point being that there's dozens of ways of doing multi-language sites and which one is best will depend on the site itself, how it's going to be managed, how the data is going to be used, the audience, etc etc.