The Packt Book by Kristen Pol, Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites, should be required reading for any Drupal developer or organization wishing to increase their audience by adding additional languages to their websites. Written in an easy going conversational style, Pol makes reading this book a pleasure for beginners or advanced Drupalists.
In Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites, Pol uses meaningful real world examples that are still easy to implement for beginners and intermediate developers and a good starting point for advanced developers. Pol starts off her book with an overview of language translation, localization, and case studies in Chapter 1. This chapter gives the reader a good understanding of the how’s and why’s of language translation. In chapter 2 she discusses roles, users, permissions and language detection scenarios via URL, sessions, and user preference. Pol discusses in Chapter 3 the meat and potatoes of most Drupal sites with examples on how to translate blocks, menus, and taxonomies. This chapter provides enough examples for readers to create a website that will meet common requirements. Finally, in Chapter 5, Advanced Drupal developers can learn how to use the power of Panels, SEO techniques, translation management, theming and module development to create fully functional custom sites.
Instead of spending hours or days figuring out how to create a multilingual website on your own or through trial and error; I would strongly recommend Drupal 7 Multilingual Websites by Kristen Pol. It is a great book that is easy to read and use on real world websites
You can get the book here: http://link.packtpub.com/vJPDRo
~Peter Fortuna