Does translating your website hurt or harm your Google Ranking?

Finding an effective method of translating your website

[JamaicanFood]

Hello

This is a quick question on the most prudent method of translating a website in a manner that it is part of your initial website but does not affect how Google ranks you.

Using the method: (Adopted by many threads here)
a.)Translate using translation software.
b.)Edit the documents/articles using humans – saves tremendously on cost.

Now the hard part is I want to create a website that allows browsers to choose the language they can read the site in as well as optimize for google.fr, google.es etc. Now my dilemma is can I use my main website and have these additional sites all under one umbrella meaning:
www.mysite.com/mysiteinfrench.html
www.mysite.com/mysiteinspanish.html
ETC

I will off course register new sites of mysite.fr or mysite.esp.

But this is the problem having the translated pages will actually quadruple the size of my website (in number of pages i.e content), NOTE: I have followed a keyword density suggestion of 8% across the board for each page.

Now will Google.Com – America & UK penalize me for not having enough content about that specific topic relative to the size of the website? Or will it see the translated pages as jibberish i.e much ado about nothing

Also will the English version of the site outweigh the other registered sites in .fr and .esp because of sheer size or can those other sites hold their own in Google searches?

Can someone help out with this ques?

[tedster]

I helped organize a project like this for an organization last year. They've had no problems at all with Google. Each translation is in its own directory (/de/ /fr/ /es/ and so on) with all the appropriate language headers. We translated everything, including file names.

There's been only benefit. This was human translation, by the way.

[JamaicanFood]

Tedster...Human transaltion is going to run me at source $40 per page USD. With over 2,000 + pages not to mention our dictionary and that fact that there is Castillian spanish, Brazilian Spanis, Spanish Spanish...you get the drift.

But did it affect how google english viewed the main english site..?

[tedster]

Nothing I can see at all - in fact the client now sees slightly more Google traffic to the English pages.