Building sites with 2 languages

Hey all,

I have this local business site created, all in english, all SEO'd and stuff, ranking well, all is good.

Now. Upon doing more in-depth keyword research, I realized that the french versions of the keywords are QUADRUPLE in terms of traffic.

Obviously, I'm scrambling to get this done today, but I'm faced with a pretty big problem: How the heck do I translate this?

I thought of plugins to translate, but I don't think they do such a great job, nor do they translate actual content. I could be wrong here, but I'd like some feedback. Also I think the SEO would be pretty messed up.

The other thing I thought of doing is, and this is all Wordpress based, I was thinking of creating a new folder on my host next to all the WP stuff currently is, named "FR" , and copy the WP install entirely and tweak it.

I could also just re-install WP there with tables with a fr prefix, but I want to keep the SEO work that was done on the primary domain. I could be wrong here too where it may not even matter in the end, but I want the french pages to rank well too.

Anyway, I think you get the idea. Any feedback is appreciated, thanks guys!

Have also been looking at the same area recently with non wordpress sites and came across Incansoft's Translator script but I'd be interested to see what others have to say here on a solution / style to go with?

Good stuff wild1, but again, how will SEO be affected by this? I'm not sure I understand how search engines are going to crawl the site in french with this