Some of the text pieces on the master page needed to be available in all supported languages. That is why we decided to make use of the LanguageText control. This control looks up a SharePoint list with a tag and returns the text in the wanted language column.

<BKSControls:LanguageText
   ID="BreadcrumbNav"
   WebSiteUrl="/"
   ListTitle="LanguageText"
   ColumnName="Title"
   ColumnValueTrue="Navigation.Breadcrumb"
   LangColumnNames="de-DE,de-CH,fr-CH,it-CH,en-US"
   LangNames="de-DE,de-CH,fr-CH,it-CH,en-US"
   runat="server" />

The parameter WebSiteUrl sets the location of the list and ListTitle its name.

ColumnName is the name of the column where the tag is in, so actually you could use one of the language columns as tag column.

ColumnValueTrue is the tag itself, which needs to match the text in the column specified in ColumnName.

LangNames specifies a list of the 5 chars long location name, which is mapped to the columns specified in a list in LangColumnNames. Simple and flexible.