Translations indexed by Google?

How to translate

[SuperRedBear]

Hello,
Perhaps someone could advise. I want to have my website translated into as many languages as possible, and I want to do this in a way that is friendly to Google and other engines, would like Google to index the translated pages (and also since I have Adsense on the site, I don't want to violate any TOS)

I've seen a few scripts for sale online that claim to do this, and there are the services that provide translation... that are a bit more than I want to spend and I've never had success with Babelfish - text comes out a mess and there is alot of added html...I suspect it's not search engine friendly...

Anyway, was hoping someone might advise how to do this.
Best, SRB

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:24 pm (utc) on May 20, 2007]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]

[Haecceity]

Machine translation is an abomination. It just doesn't work except to give a rough sense of what a page is about.

So I suppose the rest of your question may be to do with deciding whether to have subdomains, like http://cn.example.com, subdirectories, like http://www.example.com/de/, or even localized websites, like http://www.example.com.fr.

What's best for you depends on your needs. Subdomains will be treated as separate sites by Google. Subdirectories will keep everything in one domain and conserve PR. Local sites will rank better in Google's local searches (google.fr, etc).

[edited by: tedster at 2:13 am (utc) on May 21, 2007]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it will never be owned [/edit]

[DamonHD]

There is also HTTP-standard 'content negotiation' where the page is shown in the language selected by the user in their browser (or OS install).

Getting the separate translations of the same page is difficult but not impossible. I do it.

Have a look at the discussions in the AsiaPac forum.

Rgds

Damon