It is clearly true that with a number of translations the archetype will grow bigger, and initially (some years ago) I thought separate files might be better as well. But I really wonder if it makes any difference in the end - since, in generating the 'operational' (aka 'flat') form of an archetype that is for end use, the languages required (which might still be more than one) can be retained, and the others filtered out. I don't think gettext would deal with this properly - the idea that an artefact can have more than one language active.
The other good thing about the current format (which will eventually migrate to pure dADL+cADL) is that it is a direct object serialisation, and can be deserialised straight into in-memory objects (Hash tables in the case of the translations). Anyway, I think that we need to carefully look at the requirements on this one, before leaping to a solution... - thomas
