Some time ago I had to create a project that supported multiple languages. I struggled to get it right without making a mess of my routes. After some research I managed to created a good sollution for this problem.

Normally a url is build up like this:
http://domain.com/controller/action/

What we want to do is create routes that let us create these url’s
http://domain/language/controller/action/

The routes config should look like this:

routes.module.type          = Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Module
routes.module.abstract      = On  

routes.route.type           = Zend_Controller_Router_Route
routes.route.route          = ":language"
routes.route.reqs.lang      = "^(en|nl|de|fr|es|it)$"
routes.route.defaults.lang  = "en"
routes.chain.type           = Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Chain
routes.chain.chain          = "route,module"

All you need to do now is initialize these routes and you can add the languages to your url.