I was recently thinking about this in the context of a regular web page, and came to the conclusion that root folders are the most appropriate for translated content. I mean:
https://www.example.com/en/Main page
https://www.example.com/pl/Strona główna
If you have one primary language that is clearly dominant, you could omit the language prefix for it (i.e. https://www.example.com/Main page
).
Regarding the different URLs for the same page, I would rather them be cross-linked than have things like /pl/main-page
but that’s a matter of taste. Also conveniently for this approach, SilverBullet does not show the full path of linked pages, so [[pl/Przykład]]
would still show up as Przykład
in text.
Against tags: I would use them for many-to-many relation, and a given piece of prose (not #meta
pages) is only one spoken language.
Against separate instances: This feels appropriate if the different languages correspond to different content, since I’d say that they feel “farther” than folders.
https://en.example.com/Main page
https://pl.example.com/Strona główna
Possibly the biggest example is Wikipedia, which is not simply translated to different languages, but consists of “342 active Wikipedias”, that each have their own communities, rules etc. I would use subdomains for example if I had a store that had different stock for Europe and US.
On the other hand, my browser doesn’t highlight the subdomain, so maybe it’s only my perception that thinks it’s important:

There is also the option of having different TLDs:
https://www.example.com/Main page
https://www.example.pl/Strona główna
Apart from practical problems of maintaining multiple domain names, I think there is nothing to communicate that the two domains are the same entity, so I’d rather see my first solution and redirections like example.pl/ => example.com/pl/
.
One specific feature of SilverBullet that may be relevant here is the possibility to reference other pages in Frontmatter. While they aren’t clickable (yet?), it could help you organize, especially if you plan to use automated tooling. They will also show in Linked Mentions this way, without putting them into the page text itself.
---
translations:
pl: "[[Strona główna]]"
pt: "[[Página inicial]]"
---