I run a french-speaking poker community and when I opened my website at the beginning of November 2006, I had the same question as you!

I'm still quite new in the affiliate world, but our site did grew a lot (now near 650 members; lots of them are active)
But here is the answer I can give you from my little experience...:
First of, I contacted some poker site that provide english article and ask them if I could translate them and put a banner of their site at the beginning of the article.
Second, I wrote some articles myself. I used to (and still is) be an internet poker player and was pretty active on french-speaking forum. So I decided to wrote my own articles.
Third, we asked some other good french-speaking internet players and asked them if they wanted to write some article.
This is how most of our articles came from.
Btw, in what language are you looking for articles?