How can I make my joomla site multilingual?

I want to make my joomla开发者_C百科 website(virtuemart -ecommerce) multilingual. User can choose the language from front-end. I saw a extension named 'JosLang'. Is it good enough?

Languages I want to implement: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Russian

To translate the content of the site there are basically 2 solutions, based on external extensions:

1) Free: use JoomFish 2) Paid: use Nooku Content

Based on the target of your site, that's the choice.

Starting from very basic joomla has a Language folder in its root.

The folder contains various subfolders.

en-gb, cs-cZ, be- BY, fr-FR for various languages.

These folders have number of files.

like in en-gb folder we have en-gb.com_content.ini, en-gb.plg_content_vote.ini,en-gb.mod_stats.ini etc for modules components and plugins. These files have key value pairs for language specific things.

where keys are text lines that you pass in jText method in your component module or plugin code.