There's a new module that creates a systematic process for content translation:
http://drupal.org/project/translation_management
First (Beta) version was released yesterday and we're eager to get feedback about it. It uses the existing Drupal multilingual tables and adds the flow for translation management.
It assumes two distinct roles:
- Content manager - who decides what to translate and (optionally) assigns different jobs to different translators
- Translators - each translator has translation language pairs, which they can translate between.
The content manager uses the Translation Dashboard. This gives a quick picture of the site's contents. All content types are listed in the same page. You can show only items that need translation and send them to translation at once.
Translators will receive email notifications (almost implemented). Then, they log in to Drupal and see a list of pending jobs. They can click to translate each of the jobs assigned to them.
Translation itself is done in a special editor screen, created by the module. It's not the standard i18n Translate tab. Instead, we created a Unified Translation Editor. This editor adapts to whatever is being translated.
The translator sees the original text next to the translation. Translators can indicate that each field is complete and move on to the next one. We've tried to allow for keyboard-only translation for quick editing.
This is how the editor looks like:

The module is working now, but we're still adding more functionality. Anyone want to take it for a spin or a development system?