Looking at this from a GNOME 2.5/2.6 perspective, and looking at the "proposed" section of http://www.gnome.org/start/2.5/modules/, I think there is unfortunately a danger of this piece of history repeating itself, perhaps even more than before. There are modules like dasher that are not even in GNOME cvs yet, and which GNOME translators have had little chance to work on and little possibility to try to find the problems in time.
FWIW, I think Dasher has very few translatable strings. There may be otheri18n issues with it (for instance it requires character-sequence frequency data which may not be available for all languages), but msgstr translation is unlikely
to be a problem IMO.Matthew, are you there? What's the status of the character prediction algorithms
for non-English and non-Latin? - Bill