How does Google see an article in two languages?

[erinhealthchoices]

Hi,

We are translating our articles into French (they are already in English) and are considering Cantonese & Mandarin. How does Google see this? Say I post an article on Diabetes Symptoms in English, Cantonese and French. Same article, different languages. Does Google look at this as three separate articles, ranking you uniquely, or does it count as one article?

Thanks,

Erin

[RyanKent]

Same article, different languages. Does Google look at this as three separate articles, ranking you uniquely, or does it count as one article?

A translated article is viewed as unique content.

A helpful video concerning translated content (though not your specific question): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyWx31GeQWY

You should also be aware of some newly published information regarding duplicating content in various languages: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

[donford]

They would have different urls correct?

site.com/diabetes-symptoms.php&lang=EN
site.com/diabetes-symptoms.php&lang=FR
site.com/diabetes-symptoms.php&lang=CH
etc..

In this case they would be treated as different pages and credit given to each as such.

Now if you didn't have unique url's rather some sort of switch via javascript or database entries that are served based on the language they choose.. then it would cause issues.