routing multilanguage urls

Hi All!
I'm wondering what is the correct way in Mason2 to achieve the following:

- The site should have one default language, without any language codes 
in urls, and English as the second language, with urls starting with /en/
- The components are the same for both languages, i.e. content is chosen 
inside the same component based perhaps on some global variable that is 
set within each request depending on the language code in the url.
- Except for these language codes, the urls generally map to physical 
component files, so /contact and /en/contact should both map to real 
file contact.mc

This is how I have done it so far:

- Created a component (en.mp) that sets a request variable:

  $m->request_args->set(lang=>'en');

Then it does an internal redirect with modified request_args:

  $m->visit($m->path_info, $m->request_args);

However I don't like this solution because:

- don't like messing up request_args which can later cause some problems 
(e.g. unintended args passed to the form processing code and generally 
to all the components)
- suppose that visit() isn't meant to be used like that and may have 
some performance impact here

So my questions are:

- what is the correct way to set a global variable changing its value 
per request?
- how could I hack the path_info so that /en/ prefix could be just 
dropped and the request processing simply continued as if there were no 
this prefix in the path?

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