How can I get search engines to crawl my site and see a localised view of my data?

Fake site

Our site lists products for sale.

eg : http://www.myWebSite.com/products/some-drink-we-love-to-guzzle

Each product page has been translated into a few languages: English(UK), English(US), French, German, Chinese.

Can Google (or any search engine) search our site and be smart enough to 'see' the localised version so people can find our products, if they search for it in their own language?

eg.

In my browser i have Chinese set as my default language. I then go to my favorite search engine or aHong Kong search engine (assumption: it's defaulted to Chinese) and search for a product - in Chinese. The URL is in US English but the page should be found because the content was all in Chinese...

Is this scenario possible? Can we tell search engines to hit my site as say you want french content, or German content, etc.. ?? so it knows to index that content under that language?

ANSWER:-

Each URL should only return one page. Slight variations are fine, but the same page in a different language belongs on a different URL. Either a subfolder or subdomain are fine - see this question for more info.

If one particular version is far more popular than another you could make that the default, for examplesite.com/product/something for American visitors, then site.com/de/product/something for German users. Redirect as appropriate and/or provide links for users to choose a different language if they desire.

Google is perfectly adequate at determining the language of the page (although adding the language meta tag is a great idea), so while country-specific domains would help, they are not necessary.

Note: If you are simply translating text between pages I would suggest merging the US/UK parts into one. But if you need to show country-specific data such as prices, then keep them separate.