Should my / route redirect to /en/?

I'm working on a website with the url strategy that the site's locale is embedded in the url, eg.

example.com/en/    - Welcome page in English
example.com/en/... - English pages here
example.com/de/    - Welcome page in German

etc.

If the user opens the url http://example.com/ then the default (English) content should be shown. The question is, should I duplicate the content from http://example.com/en/ or should I redirect to that location?

I think that the user would find it more intuitive if he is not redirected away from the / route. But I have heard that search eng开发者_StackOverflow社区ines (mainly Google) does not like that multiple pages contain identical content, and will downgrade the page rank based on this.

Is this true?

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I think that the best way is to redirect to that location. It isn't a good seo practice to have duplicate content on your website.

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i think you can get away without doing any redirection or duplicate contents if you save the chosen language in the client itself (i.e: cookie).

so by default, internally, you will show the english content. but if the user selects a different language, a cookie will be set in the browser and the next time, having this cookie you can now internally decide to show the content for another language.

EDIT: having different domain names might also help, like: en.example.com and es.example.com (this would allow google to index both of your sites)