steveb - 12:16 am on Jun 4, 2004 (gmt 0)

No worries about crosslinking

Possibility of authoratative links in several languages make your domain more of an authority overall... even a good german link will thus benefit the italian section of a domain.

No sandbox.

Increase in regular and deeper crawling -- though this will likely be negative if we are talking about a domain over 10,000 pages.

No risks in terms of "seeming genuinely 3rd party". You are not doing anything that a search engine would look negatively on. Creating a bunch of dinky domains raises the possibility, however remote, of attracting a crosslinking penalty. If an engine thinks, "hmm, this seemingly is NOT genuine" then you made a problem which had no positive side.

Get genuine links and make an authoritative domain useful to citizens of world who speak many languages. Having several languages that get at least some links to the sections is a powerful signal of authoritative value all by itself.

Just look at it as a user or a search engine, this domain cares enough about its content to make it available in several languages. Assuming non-machine translations, how can this single fact not make a person or a search engine at least a little (and probably a lot) more confident in the value of the domain's content?

Take what genuine signals of quality you can get.