Multi Languages: best practices?

Hi,
my web site will have to be in 4 languages.
What best practices would you recommand.

Mainly, I will have 3 small flag icons on each page.
A click to a specific flag will switch to the same page in the other language.

The usual way would be to have:
page1 -> /de/page1 for German, or ->/us/page1 for English, etc...
That means that each page has specific static links for each flag icon.

The best way would be, but I don't know whether this is possible with WebDesigner, to assign a value to a variable, say "lang" and set it to "de" or "us" and then have dynamic links assigned to the flag icons, something like
/%lang%/page1
Most pages would be HTML, not PHP. That's why I'm asking.

Is this possible?
Any other recommendation, any good idea?

Thanks for any help.
Steve

I would suggest creating 3 xar files. Each with the separate language version of the site. Create one site, then save it with different name and replace all the text in it.

Yes thanks,
but my question was regarding the links between the three sites, the three versions.
How do you jump from one to another one?
Manually encode each link pointing to the other language? Or with a variable that is set
across all pages and interpreted when switching to another version?