Translation and Voice

[Catherine Kane]

For those of you who manage multi-language sites, I'm looking for perspective/best practice regarding translation.

We almost always establish our site and material in English, then use in-house translation for the other three official languages - in our case, French, Spanish, Arabic and occasionally Russian. When this is the case, do you use the same voice and language for each version of the site, or do you find that translators can opt for a different voice?