Dashboard region strings are untranslated

So I think this code might be OK as is.

You'll notice that the standard theme regions (listed in _system_rebuild_theme_data()) are not translated either. And many regions are defined in theme .info files, where they can't be translated because .info files aren't even PHP code.

So I think the intention is that theme regions are supposed to be translated on display only, which Drupal 6 did. But there appears to be a longstanding bug in Drupal 7 where it stopped doing that, so I filed a patch for that here: #1050686: Theme region names are no longer translated

One interesting question regarding Dashboard, though, is how the string extractor is supposed to find them when it parses the code looking for translatable strings? I think it already parses .info files looking for region names, and then has a hardcoded list for the ones defined in _system_rebuild_theme_data(). So perhaps we need to move this issue to http://drupal.org/project/potx to make sure that module has a way to pick up the dashboard region names also.

One more :)