Our client currently has a website with two languages 'UK English' and 'Irish English'. Both languages are a classic two tree structure, selecting a different hostname for each language.

We're now redeveloping their site, and they want to get around the issue that there are only very minor differences between the two sites and yet every content change must be done twice. Still the differences include pages that exist in one language and not the other, and pages that have different content. They also wish to use a single host name, and select the correct country site based on their browser settings,  but allowing the user the change site manually.

My plan is hook in to the document service's events so that when a page is created/saved/edited/deleted etc in the UK site, an Irish equivilent page is created. The two trees are then set to have a different culture. This should create two identical sites, so in order to create the differences the user could select a document property to be 'This language only'. When that property is set the syncing would NOT take place.

Can anyone see a major problem with the approach, have a better idea, or know of any existing code that might help me?

In the future the 'page versions' feature might well have helped with this.