How should I say this? It would be great if all developers wrote internationalized code. It would be great if all text resources were written in non-binary structured mark-up, like Docbook.

Out of nothing you get nothing. Let's be aware of the limitations of converters: out of formatting mark-up (OpenOffice) or page composition instructions (LaTeX) you can't get semantic mark-up (Docbook). Out of pairs of strings with sparse comments (PO) you can't get workflow logs (XLIFF).

What editors are teachers familiar with? Just Word or oowriter? Can we demand them to learn how to use new tools? We need a web interface that insures (1) easy access to cooperation and (2) reuse of translations.

User Interfaces (UI) are not the same as documents and resources. We have the tools for UI, they work with PO. We don't have the tools to extract XLIFF from our programming languages. And we also have thousands of translations in PO for near all the languages in the world. They needn't be converted: what we need is web-accessible TMX translation memories.

How to achieve a standard of quality and continuity with volunteers? It's high time to (3) start a more professional approach, including training and reviewers and (4) terminology tools must also help us make our translations more coherent.

We cannot forget that for education it's the resources that are instrumental.