I'm soon one year of statamic development and guess what, as the old saying says, carpenter's house always needs work. My own website has been craving for redesign for years, I've built a nuxt prototype with nice vue components and in the mean while found the new laravel / tailwind / vite stack very attractive. Therefore my second real work on statamic is on track, and yes it's a bilingual website built with the free version of the software. Please use this technique as a first step towards standard multisite / multilingual procedure of statamic pro version that will only cost you a few hundred dollars, less time and money than reading this article and making it work. But still a good way to learn statamic templates and techniques.
Tip no1 : selective navigation
let's say, you want french and english : the idea is to create a page tree with one top page per language. Then create two navigations, one for each language. You can then build your menu this way , in antlers templating language, to display specific menu depending on top parent page uri / url :
{{ if parent:url =="/en" || parent:url == '' }} {{ nav:en }} {{ partial:wave/nav_entry }}{{ /nav:en }} {{/if}}
{{ if parent:url =="/fr" || current_uri =="/fr" }} {{ nav:fr }} {{ partial:wave/nav_entry }}{{ /nav:fr }} {{/if}}