In my experience WPML was enough. Can you be more specific on what makes you think it’s not enough? Maybe a topic based discussion would be better ok this one.
I mean… themes are made in english language. If I need create a website in english, italian and french, should I also translate the theme in italian and french ? Or just installing WPML and work on that plugin ?
WPML is plugin that saves you time by duplicating the pages, post and taxonomies so that you don’t have to go about duplicating everything – but it does not translate content. You (or somebody in your team) will need to make the translations. However I must say that it really saves a lot time and effort. See their web site for better explanation.
Once again: My experience with the plugin was good.
If you are developing your own theme, then ensure all static text output is done through i18n functions like __(). That is the beginning of generating translation files as outlined in t-p’s links.
If you are using an existing theme, then hopefully translation files already exist. I’ve not used WPML myself, but I would expect it to set locales as required, which will cause the proper translation files to be used with your theme when it is loaded on each request.
