On the subdomains topic, on one of my sites I went the subdomain way for languages. Example: www is for english, de is for german, fr is for french and so on. The reason I did this is because I wanted Google to index the sites properly, in the right language. So if you go to google.fr and search for some of its keywords you would see the french version and not the english one. I'm just not sure how Google behaves but my feeling is that if all your languages are on the same domain (without any difference on the URL) then it will always display the english one by default (assuming it's the default one, obviously). Can anyone enlighten me?

It's been working for me but I notice the english version (which is the default one, www, but not the one with most visits) is not working as good as the other languages so I'd say juice is not shared between subdomains, like Patrick said. Still trying to figure out what's the best solution...