Starting from complete ignorance, I have set-up comprehensive multilingual functionality for my website after watching the video presentation, "Don't Get Lost in Translation: Multilingual Site Building In Drupal 7" from DrupalCon Denver as well as Gábor Hojtsy's multi-part series, Drupal 7's Multilingual Systems. That series focuses heavily on Drupal Core and i18n's functionality but for setting up entity translation module (which is discussed as a great improvement over some features of drupal core and i18n) see the D.O article, "Setting Up Entity Translation".
A couple of issues you might run into when starting out:
- If you're wondering why you don't see the translate tab while your editing a node it is because you have the language of that node set to "language neutral" which makes the translate tab disappear. You have to change the language of the node to english or whichever language you wish to use as your default. (note: I've also read that you should also disable "Select Nodes by Language" but I'm still looking for that option, apparently it's somewhere in Admin > Configuration > Regional and Language > Multilingual Settings but I don't see it.)
- You will read that you must install the title module in order to make the title property an editable field. If you are using a view to display your node you must choose Content: Title that does NOT say "The Content Title". This may cause issues with linking to the node, see Entity Translated Content with Views for solutions. (note: I had no issue with my views after enabling the title module)