Creating multiple sites sounds like a good idea. Only for site editors it may be not so comfortable because they should (?) switch between sites while editing content. But in the other hand one person don't usually manage all the content in different languages. And for larger sites the different site idea should be best for multilingual sites.
But in my case, I made a little hack to support what I needed. When creating pages, user can now choose the language the page belongs. It may not be the best solution, but it was OK to me. Because the site I'm working on is a quite specific and small and is primarily based on custom image gallery. So this hack shouldn't be a problem for this site :)