But in the short term we'll get more mileage from localising ET for non-English use, perhaps with a simple link to a 'translate this page' feature on something like Babelfish. It would be a simple and quick mash-up which would do the job almost as well as a three year research project would.

I wouldn't see developing new language community spin-offs as a bad thing, as long as there was some cross fertilisation between them.

If ET became multilingual overnight, we'd soon be swamped by content. We might be better off having roving front pagers who can cross-post specific topics.

Possibly the easiest way to implement this would be to run everything on a single server in a single database, with language tags for user filtering, and either individual cross-post tags for specific language crossovers, and a global show-all tag for ultra-special posts that would interest everyone.

With a bit of code you could possibly persuade the mash-up to show the translations automatically, with an option to have volunteer translators who can spend 15-20 minutes beating a machine translation into something that makes local sense.