Locales sub directories on Nginx
When you are following the each-locale-gets-its-own-index.php-file pattern as outlined in the official KB article, “How do I show localized content on the front end?”, then you do not need to include the locale ID in your sections’ Entry URL Format settings.

For example if you have a News section, and you want Arabic entries to get URLs that look like:

http://www.site.com/ar/news/my-entry-slug


Then the Arabic Entry URL Format should just be this:

news/{slug}


not this:

ar/news/{slug}


Everything leading up to “news/{slug}”, including “ar/”, is handled by your Arabic site URL, as defined in your config/general.php file’s siteUrl setting:

'siteUrl' =&gt; array(
    'en' =&gt; 'http://www.site.com/',
    'ar' =&gt; 'http://www.site.com/ar/',
    // ...
),