We set up some international sites around this time last year ( over a dozen of them in fact).
We had the same thought you did, and were concerned that the content translations might be classed as duplicate copy, From what we've seen it shouldn't do, especially if you're aiming the sites/ folders at specific countries in Webmaster Tools.
We've done this with International sites which use the English language and we've not had an issue with increasing our rankings so far. So if it's working like that for us, then you should be fine as well.
