A great new Joomla feature is the Multilingual Association Manager allows you to make translations using one interface ( and not needing any extra plug-ins).
The value for International Business has never been greater!
Internet Marketing Experts suggest that adding a second language to your website would possibly increase your overall growth rate with roughly 50-150%. After all, English is not the most spoken language as statistics show that only 360 million people speak it. Spanish is actually more popular than English spoken by over 405 million people. Actually Chineese (Mandarin) is the Most Spoken Language with over 995 million speakers world-wide!
International market exposure is the key topic here. Once Multilingual content is available the search engines (for website exposure) will take care of the international marketing for you. There are a lot of product/service niches that are not yet fully overtaken by corporate giants. Internet Marketing Experts suggest that opening your website to a second language (example Spanish) would increase your traffic and possibly sales with 50%-130% (after all Spanish is the second most popular language).
One Site with Many Languages or Individual site for each language?
In the past the only way to do this with Joomla was to create individual installations pre-set on the specific language which requires quite a lot of works since one has to manage more than one website which can be quite annoying although has its own benefits as each site can be different from the other (which generally is not the case).
Having one website being translated into multiple languages is usually the best way since Google can actually understand that those are translations of the same content and increase your Importance in the search results. This openness to many languages is welcomed at Google. Not to mention that managing just one website is much much easier!