Differences in SEO for different languages?

What are the main differences in doing SEO in another language, say Chinese?

Is it all the same, just with a different set of characters?

What I know right now is at least the targeted search engine is different. Here in Taiwan, it's Yahoo. In China, it's Baidu.

I image this at least is game-changing.

Any info on this?

At its core, it is all the same. Different engine may have a different focus on what help/hurts rankings like Baidu. But all in all, if you have great site in English you can copy it, replace the text (Not the exact same text just translated) with the local language (Do your back linking of course) and it will do well.