Storing short strings in DB or variables?

[webpoet]

I´m working on a project of about 10 pages. The site needs to be available in several languages from the start and adding other languages afterwards must also be easy.
What I´ve decided so far is that the user is able to decide in his settings page what language he wants to browse the site in. That is then stored in the database and every time he logs in his language choice is stored in his session data.
Content (such as longer text) will of course be stored in the database to and thereby theres really no problem to fetch the right content in the right language for each page the visitor browses.

However, what I just can´t seem to decide is how I should store short strings, such as those used in the interface, forms, links etc...
I could of course hard code them on each page using a IF- or SWITCH-statement to decide what language they should be echoed in, but that´s hardly flexible.
So, I see two other alternatives:

1. I store all short strings in variables or arrays in a inc-file and just call the variables from some evaluating function in my main scripts.

2. I store all the short strings in the DB to.

Now, what I need help with is to determine if I should go with alternative 1 or 2 ? What is the fastest and least serverdemading solution ?
Or is there anyone who can give me a third and better alternative ?

[drew010]

What I might do that is a much simpler solution is set a cookie, or an ip into a database, whichever you prefer. and the language preference can either create a session variable or a query string, and thru that var or qstring, you could call a language file, such as eng.php and it contains variables like
$string1 = "Welcome to our site.";
$string139 = "This is the section of our site where......";

and a file for every language with all the $string vars translated and on your actual php pages all the code in there is variables so depending on what language file gets called, it is included in the page and all those variables are filled in. So if you used a query string to do that the $PHP_SELF may look like /page/browse.php?lang=eng and in your program you could have
include("/path/to/langfiles/" . $lang . ".php"); so that will call in that file, and if its cookies storing the preference it could be
$lang = $_COOKIE['lang']; and the you could use that same include directive.

Hopefully that helped or gave you some more ideas.