perhaps off on a tangent but have you tried Qtranslate http://www.qianqin.de/qtranslate/ seems to have a good stable architecture from what people are saying
I’m by no means an expert on this but personally I’d give the plugins a try – customising 5 separate versions of wordpress and keeping them updated sounds like a ball-ache to me – certainly not efficient anyway.
Might be worth taking a look at this >> http://www.narga.net/build-full-multilanguage-website-with-wordpress/ I think I’m going to try both WPML and Xlanguage and see how I get on. Can always roll back if they’re not bahaving…
that’s excellent thanks. Got the titles back (although a different size). not sure why but lightbox isn’t working on the new posts either. Strange. Better anyway.
Thanks again