Multiple Internation Sites?

Hello, I have a question about international hosted websites. I wondered if anyone would be kind enough to offer an opinion...

I run a website for international antique collectors of a specific object type. My site is a .com but hosted in the UK. I have been running it for over 10 years with quite a few links from other websites (mainly in the US). My google ranking in the US is 4th on the second page and in the UK it is 2nd on the first page (I assume because it is UK hosted?)

My question is that I am now planning to get the website translated into other languages. Would I be better having locally hosted websites mirroring the contents in the local language or just have the central site show the translated pages automatically. If I stick to one site then I assume that site will have a greatly increased count of referring links, but will that be of more benefit than local hosting and a domain name in the same language, but with only a small number of referring links?

eg... widgetsite has 100 referring links.

Option 1. - widgetsite remains the same with 100 links. I create a new French site and a German site which will be hosted locally and each may have 10 referring links...
Option 2. - I just add the translations to widgetsite which now will have 120 links but won't be locally hosted and the domain name will not be in French or German.

What would people suggest? Is it more important to be locally hosted with a few links or be established with a large number of referring links?

Mark.

There are various ways to do it, and branding is one of the considerations. The strongest reason for going with separate sites for different languages is branding. On the other hand, staying on the same site is not necessarily awful branding either, especially if your domain name is transparent in other languages.

From a purely SEO/practical point of view, I would say keep everything on the same site. Do not put content subdomains such as fr.mainsite.com, it.mainsite.com etc. Google views subdomains as separate sites, and your main site's authority will not helpt them. Indead, create language/country specific subforlders: mainsite.com/fr/, mainsite.com/it/, etc. You can associate those subfolders with the appropriate regions in Google webmaster tools. You can use sudomains for branding, e.g. have fr.mainsite.com 301-redirect to mainsite.com/fr/ (but remember that link power degrades to some moderate degree via 301-redirects (and is lost altogether via any other redirects).

Link your regional subfolders directly from your home page and try to avoid or minimize creating other subfolders within them. Given the subfolder structure, your regional pages will benefit from the authority of your entire site.

To gain high rankings in the regions googles, such as google.fr and google.it, you will still need to get links to the appropriate regional pages from websites hosted in the corresponding regions and/or with appropriate regional extensions (.fr, .it). But remember that other languages are much less competitive than English and good results are relatively easy to achieve. You may see some even before you get regional links.

Thank you very much for your response!!!! Some good things to think about!