If you use a professional human translator or a good native speaking writer to translate your English articles to another language, the content is completely altered to suit the particular country in complete understanding of its culture, differences in syntax taking into consideration culturally and legally acceptable texts or expressions. The essence or the message being conveyed is still there but the writing approach will be different, sensitive to the market.
To answer your question, Google doesnt see translated content if done via a professional human translator as duplication.
Google may easily regard your article as spamming or duplicate if your approach is just simply literal “word by word†translation or even use of automated applications. The content more often than not will not convey its real messages, loses its relevance, makes no sense at all in terms of grammar and understanding.
There are so many technicalities involved to rank high in search engine results. It is best you make a research particular to each foreign market and launch it one at a time to make sure everything is in place. You may need to consider also the domain or URL structure to use with multilanguage versions and submitting your changes for Google indexing.
Take note Google is not the top ranking Search Engine in certain countries like China or Russia. Whatever search engine you will be using, quality content is still the most important SEO element.
