Sites that target a multinational audience and want to offer more than one language run in danger of getting into a mess. To accomplish multilingual content, people tend to use multiple sites. Different content editors are not aware of changes made to a particular page, design changes have to be implemented on each site..sooner or later the sites will drift apart, too much time is spent keeping a congruent presentation. Managed content translation is meant to address these problems.
On Joomla's internationalisation components you have all your languages on a single system, users can switch between the languages available on each page while staying on the current content page.
Administrators and content editors have their language versions well organised since those elements are treated as a single unit in the system. On changes in the master version instantly get registered and translated versions are marked acordingly. Using Unicode as standard character set, even complex languages as Chinese, Japanese can be easily maintained. Also the administrative backend is available in a wide variety of languages and allows administrators to choose their preferred language individually, making your system multilingual and multinational as a whole.
