Say you want to create a website with an English and a German version of it. Is it usually better to host the German content on the English language website or get a separate domain/website for this?

the advantages of using two sites seem to be:

- cctld (and possibly hosting in the country)
- being a local site that users searching for in that language might be more likely to click on
- webmasters in the field might be more likely to link to a domain in their language

the main advantage of one single site seems to be:

- not having to build up the link authority for two websites

I assume it depends on the site/industry one is in, but my guess is that oftentimes it might be easier to rank for both sites and get the most traffic for the work put in by only using one domain/website.

However, I have no idea how the search engines treat links in a different language. Ive heard it was to computationally expensive for them to translate links/websites. Is that true?

If so are links from sites in another language with anchor text in another language as good as links in the same language that don't have the keywords in their anchor text?

Would every link from a site in another language be seen as a link from a non-related site or do the engines understand it's a site on the same topic, but in another language?

thanks!