Help with bi-lingual site

Hello,

I am currently working on a site for someone that needs to be in both English and French. I have looked at some translating plug-ins but they do not really seem to be up to the task, mostly regarding outgoing links.

I thought about it for a while and came up with what I believe to be a solution.

What I decided to do is to set-up two wordpress sites that are identical, except for the language. One would be located in a /en/ sub folder, the other in /fr/. I ran into two problems though.

1. Seamlessly switching between the French and English sites.

I need to be able to switch seamlessly from the French and English sites so that when someone is at post X in English and they want to view it in French, they click on the ‘Francais’ button in the header and get taken directly to post X en Francais. Since the post ids will be the same from one blog to the next, I figured that all I need is a php tag that figures out what page the user is currently at, and inserts it into the button at the header. So the French button would have code like:

<a href="/fr/ php tag 'current page'">

and the English button (found on the French site) would read:

<a href="/en/ php tag 'current page'">

2. Linking comments between the French and English versions

Since the site needs to be able to have a dialog going in both French and English I need to be able to link the comments together for each post. I thought of just not using the comments for the French site and have all comments written to the tables in the English site, and then just have the French site read from the English tables.

How would this be done?

Finally, does this idea seem like way too much effort/impossible? I should stress that the site being seamlessly and nicely bi-lingual is very important, and that translation is not an issue. Furthermore having the French version of wordpress is also not an issue.

Any help on this issue would be immensely appreciated. PHP and I are still on shaky ground here, kinda like a 13 year old that just figured out that women have curves in all the right places. Yep, awkward as hell.

Thanks in advance,

BoykoSJ