I feel a bit of pain every time I've to write code that send out complex html pages that have to be translated.

Generally what you end up is an hard coded English version that has no real use and you can't overwrite other than... going back to the code.

It would be nice to find a system that makes the end user independent.

I thought to write a content type 'translation' and then each module in the need of complex translatable snippet of text would... create a node for each snippet of translatable text during module install and use it just loading node body.

But this has its own set of drawback. First since nodes will be created dynamically they will have non predictable nid, so I'll have to store those nid somewhere. Second... I lose all the infrastructure to "save" translations.

Currently I'm saving snippets of "translatable" text into the DB and then doing something like t($row['sometext']) that has its own set of drawback too.

Did anyone came up with anything better.

I was thinking some way to exploit http://drupal.org/project/features