Inconsistency in the translation work is one of the main problems made clear to me by the professional translators at our University (which we are trying to get involved in creating a consistent and usable German translation of dotLRN). Having different people that do not know each other work on the same translations adds to this terminological and phraseological potato soup. This is VERY different from what professional translators are used to.
I talked with Peter and Lars from Collaboraid about it and I get the feeling that this could be solved by retrieving similar words and phrases from the source and target languages and presenting them in the translator's UI (as Matthias mentions above).
Some other things that came up in the discussions was a way to improve communicating the context of used terms as well as access to translation glossaries within the interface.
Examples of glossaries we ran across that might be of value to others:
Microsoft's software glossaries (translations that tend to become convention):
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/developr/MSDN/NewUp/Glossary/
Frank Dietz's collection:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040611140150/http://www.jump.net:80/~fdietz/
Once I get a chance to touch base with Lars I will post a ToDo list. Regretfully, there is still some basic i18n infrastructure that needs to be finished before we can make this fun stuff happen.
