Choosing Domains

I am creating a website that I would like to have in english, french, spanish, and japanese. The site will consist of a blog, shop, and company info. What domains should I use?

The site will also be based in the United States.

Do you mean the domain or the domain extensions?? I know .fr is for france and .es is for spain. I don't know about Japan. Do a Google search.

Use .com domain and subdomain/directories to represent the language.

For example:

fr.domain.com or domain.com/fr/
en.domain.com or domain.com/en/

This is also simple to implement on programming with php(or any other language) so you can easily code the site to know which language it is coming from and to spit out the correct text.

EDIT: And if you want to register the equivalent domain name of all other country related extensions, you can simple redirect it to your .com primary domain.

Great thats what I was wondering, but then I also heard that search engines penalize for having info duplicated on a website. Since the info will be on a separate sub-domains will I be okay? I plan to have all the content I have on my primary English site translated to the languages I mentioned.

That is not duplicated info if you are having your website on different languages, afaik it will be duplicated if you write the same thing on all the different urls for example:

en.domain.com/my_website
fr.domain.com/my_website

Same goes for content, however some one with more expertise perhaps will give you a better reply.

Keep in mind that using automated translation may still penalize not entirely sure so use some odeskers to translate your content to native language if possible.

EDIT: Some more usefull reading material http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192

Even on google's help what I have above suggested is told as good practice.

Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries.

Click to expand...

Also, you could use redirects to prevent google and users into going to the wrong language which will make google see it as a redirect so the content will not get duplicated as it crawls your website however the users will see em in their own language.