Hey,
For my site database.hyperspectral.info I created a file with all the text for the website, which is included upon loading. So when you spit out a message, you use a variable which holds that message. For each language you have a file, and you load a specific language file, based on the language variable selected (e.g., stored in a session).
Of course you could store it in a database, or use a text-parser to replace specific strings for specific language content.
J.