Multilingual advice for a photo gallery

[Atharva]

Hi,
I have gone through many threads regarding multilingual sites.
It erased my confusion about duplicate content and subdomain/subdir choice.

I have few other questions and will be good if someone has pointers in the same.

A travel photo website exists which needs to be converted to multilingual site and there will be a subdirectory for every language.

The site structure is as follows:
1. page URL is domain.com/photos/placename/details-of-area.php
2. content consists of a pic named 'details.jpg'
3. Title, H1 consists of placename and area details info

While converting to multilingual language i will be changing the following in the respective language

1. details-of-area.php
2. details.jpg
3. title, H1
4. Should i also convert the url to domain.com/es/foto/placename/
i mean should i be replacing the word 'photos' with language specific word. i believe it might be important as it is a photo specific site, but im afraid will it be marked as spam.

What do you think of the above 4 points.

Your inputs will be valuable

Thanks

[HuskyPup]

but im afraid will it be marked as spam

Why? Because of image duplication?

You've a huge amount of work to do for each language however that's how I would do it. How many languages are you doing?

Have you read my post #:3963173 here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

You'll gain siginificant serps advantages by using example.com/es/foto/placename/ in each respective language and I also assume you will be re-naming the image to the same language?

[Atharva]

Huskypup,
Thanks and yeah you are bang-on with my understanding. I read your post too and it very much aligns with what i had in mind. good thinking.

regarding spaming, it was not related to image duplication but keyword stuffing.

the image will be renamed yeah. also im placing the 'es' part in URL so language specific users will be able to associate something for them in the SERPs

regarding language, i am starting with one and its results will enable me to make final changes and i will roll out other languages. Before that i am searching for the user statistics for those languages. i mean which language has how many internet users. i will not chase languages which have low number of users. can i get these stats sumwhere ?

Thanks again huskypup for the help

[HuskyPup]

i mean which language has how many internet users.

The principal world languages for Internet usage would have to be, in no particular order:

English
Spanish
Portuguese
Russian
Chinese (simplified)
Japanese
Korean
German

Maybe French and Italian and then, of course, Arabic!

I've sent you a sticky with some further details.

These are the supposed numbers by language:

10. French : 129 million
9. Malay-Indonesian : 159 million
8. Portuguese : 191 million
7. Bengali : 211 million
6. Arabic : 246 million
5. Russian : 277 million
4. Spanish : 392 million
3. Hindustani : 497 million
2. English : 508 million
1. Mandarin : 1 billion+

Bear in mind the six offical languages at the U.N. are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.