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One of my clients raised this question to me and it made me think. He is going to have a native Spanish speaker translate the articles for a fluent translation. These articles are also going to point towards his website. Will Google see this as duplicate content and put his SEO efforts in jeopardy?

Probably not. In fact, the spammers used to use the online translation software as way to "spin" their content. For example, they would take a English article, have the software translate it to Spanish, then stick it back in the translator and bring it back to English. Except, it would be very different (enough for the search engines). I am not recommending this procedure as it creates total garbage (not readable). But my point was that Google will probably not see it as duplicate.

Thanks for the info.

If it was French or German, that would be a problem, but not Spanish.

Really? Why does Spanish have an exception then? Just for being widely spoken in the US - if so, the internet is so global that some types of sites would want to be multilingual anyway aside from SEO purposes

I was just teasing. It would not be duplicate content in any case. Each language has a different word for the same thing.

I figured as much. Even if for no other reason than that google doesn't translate searches.

I agree. Language translators get the job done - but just barely. There are grammatical holes that are incredibly obvious to those that speak the language. Try to copy/paste and translate a Spanish article into English and see what happens.