I'm looking into translating a large UK English site into a number of other european languages. I was wondering what are the free options out there for automatic translation?
Also, in regards to SEO, how do search engines treat language copies of web pages in regards to the duplicate content rules?
Thanks
My limited experience in the matter is that the big G treats automatic language translation as duplicate content. It seems that the DC detection algorithms are language-agnostic. However, when I hand-translate into languages that I know, the 'new' pages rate highly. In fact, I would say that translating highly-rated (PR 4 and above) pages leads to better-performing pages (more search engine landings, and more varied terms as well) then even new original-content pages.
I have done no comparisons in this regard to other search engines, as they typically supply less than 10-20% of my traffic anyway.