Multilingual site question / main keywords similar in each language

[Catfish]

Supposing you have a site that is translated to multiple languages, and your main keywords would be, for example Poker Online. What if those main keywords still translate as "Poker Online" in one, two or more of the languages. Could that result in your site ranking ok in the default language, but not so well because now Google sees multiple pages with similar page titles?

I have this problem with one site where I rank Top 10 for one two-word combination of keywords. The .com/de and /fr and /es version of the site (all on same domain), targeting the same keywords - which basically do not translate but are the same words in all languages - do not rank nowhere near page 3. On-page SEO is ok on all of them, more or less same kw density, meta stuff optimized.
Possible explanations, as I see them:
Too much focus on link building to the main page (although I built quite a lot of links to inner pages as well)
G gives preference to .de, .fr, .es TLDs over .com/de
G prefers sites where the languages would be under de.maindomainname.com

Anyone has any other explanations?

[Michael Martinez]

I freely admit this is a new one to me. You might want to track down Andy Atkins-Krüger and see if he'll give you a free opinion. I would be interested to hear what he thinks. Andy is considered the Gradndaddy of International SEO in many circles -- at least as far as European+American SEO is concerned.

[parttimepoker]

Probably already doing this, but G has suggestions on how to make sure your translated content is properly perceived:

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: New markup for multilingual content

Too much focus on link building to the main page (although I built quite a lot of links to inner pages as well)
G gives preference to .de, .fr, .es TLDs over .com/de
G prefers sites where the languages would be under de.maindomainname.com

1. seems like a pretty plausible explanation
2. i don't believe this has been shown to be true
3. i don't think this is true if you're marking up your content correctly

Are you seeing other sites in the search results that are doing well across all languages for these keywords? Are there any hints in their approach?

[Catfish]

This markup for multilingual content thing rel="alternate" hreflang="es" is news to me, never thought about that. Guess I need to find out how to implement that on my (Joomla) website. Problem is, the website is one single CMS with the same HTML and template for all languages, using Joomfish as a translation tool inside the CMS. Not like one separate install per language. But there should be a way to do this.

Looking for other multilingual sites to see how they perform is definitely something I will do.

On one side, I do think that Google is clever enough to see a main page with similar meta titles and obviously targeting the same or similar keywords, and they would see that those main keywords stand for the same thing in a different language, and not hit you with a penalty for duplicate/similar meta titles. On the other hand the difference in performance between the languages is huge (default language main page ranking #5 for keywords on Google.com, while /de page, although well optimized, ranks somewhere around #200) and I can't see why.