Hi Rigel,
As was mentioned by other people, I think the right solution is a mixture of directing non-english speaking people to the appropriate native language lists, and to take advantage of our multi-cultural community by having people who can speak english and another language provide occasional translation of relevant bits of information.For our non-english speaking individuals, a compromise, I think that could be hashed on the discuss list is below. The world lingo web site provides translation between english, french, german, spanish, and a couple others.
I think the translation engine assumes the arabic alphabet. This text was converted from english to french.
http://www.worldlingo.com/en/products_services/worldlingo_translator.html
I would like to see this added as a correspondence link to the language projects, or to the OOo homepage or something!
While translation services such as the one you pointed at or babelfish seem like a good idea, unless you write the original text in the simplest possible fashion, with all words meant in their most common sense (i.e the first one you'll find in a dictionary) and no colloquialism at all (which is quite hard to do unless you're really aiming for it), you'll end up with a translation which unfortunately can only be made sense of by translating back each word in sequence into the original language, which kind of defeats the purpose as you still have to know both languages to make use of the "translation". There are multiple examples of this in both translation samples you've provided in your post.
I'd say translation (for free-form communication media such as these mailing lists) for the moment is best left to humans ;-)
Cyrille
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