I think there is a lot to learn from companies that operate in multiple languages- I used to work for one myself (until they, too, got a little copy-happy). Internationalisation is a huge market, and almost all US startups ignore it entirely. We had our original sites running in French, German, Spanish, Portugese, Hungarian, Russian... you name it. We weren't number one in any country- we were usually number 2 or 3. But none of our competitors operated outside their home country, so we managed to be very successful by occupying a lesser spot in multiple countries. Don't get me wrong, there is a large overhead in doing this- but there's plenty of opportunity, too.
One of my first startup was a webmail service available in 17 languages a few months after launch. The focus on being able to internationalize it easily was a big deal in terms of getting traction, and once we had the infrastructure, rolling out new languages was trivial.
We even launched a Catalan version, and the cost of doing a translation was well worth the PR it generated for even (or maybe especially) a minor market like that.
Can you (or anyone, really) recommend some places to learn how about how best to do internationalization? It just seems like such an overwhelming topic, and any knowledge on how to best approach it would be most helpful, I think.
