To Global Translate Or Not

So I have a few dozen blogs that all use the WordPress Global Translator plugin. This translates my entire blog into, I believe, 18 languages.

Now whether you agree with the following from an SEO point of view or not, we'll leave out of this discussion as it has worked wonders for me (PR4 within weeks); On most of these blogs, I promote my non-blog sites with a run-of-site link.

The thing is that in the translated blogs pages, my outbound link anchors are also translated. We all know how 'great' of a translation software delivers and this results in a huage # of crappy inbound link anchors.

True, link variation is key but this is a bit too varied for my taste. I can verify with Google Webmaster Tools that there's a serious # of inbound links in foreign languages.

Now to alleviate the problem at least somewhat and to also satisfy my 'run-of-site-links-BAD'-paranoia, I made it so that on all my blogs, the links to my non-blogs only show on the frontpage.


The reason I'm posting this in the first place is that across the board, I've seen my rankings for previously strong ranking keywords drop somewhat (onto the 2nd page). I never used to have the global translator plugin so it used to be just a huge # of links containing a variation of 3 different anchors I used to link to my non-blog sites.
My feeling is that I've diluted my 'main ENGLISH keywords' with 18x3 foreign keywords (18 translations of each of my 3 variations).
Do note that I have other inbound links as well.

I was just wondering if anyone had any similar experiences or any other advice on whether or not to use the Global Translator plugin (or equivalent).

[cheesy]So To Translate or Not To Translate, that's the question[/cheesy]