Dave, thanks for beginning this thread. The problem of handling i18n content is a special case of handling complex version content generally. We're grappling with that in our design for the Assessment package.
I've written up the current state of our thinking here: http://openacs.org/projects/openacs/packages/assessment/design/versioning
We want to leverage the CR in all of this, but we're not entirely clear how best to do that. This thread is an important one.