There are some other ways to approach the multilingual content question, which is mainly the 'multilingual object' concept. There's some difference between having multiple objects with language, which are related but separated objects, and having one object with multiple languages, which would show content translated upon demand to different languages.

While this second one may look more convenient and may be desirable for some specific objects, like images, which have the graphic part that doesn't need to be translated, and some text fields -title , comments- that would need translation for each language, the first one -individual objects- has some important advantages:

• Each translation can be kept separately, maintained by a different person, and can have a life of its own -status, versions..-. Also translation relations can be changed, allowing for much more flexibility from the translators point of view.
• While for some sites all the content has to be in all languages, it's not necessarily so, and many other sites may have independent content for each language, though some of it may be translated, but some other not.
• Related objects like 'comments' or 'files' may need to be linked to a specific language. Thus, multilingual content would require a language field or more additional information for any small piece of content besides main nodes -to which language version of which node it is related-.

Besides that, I want to point out that even this 'multilingual objects' feature may be implemented on top of the current 'multiple objects with language' data model. Some of the ideas I've come across and maybe deserve further development, are these ones:

• Flexinode/CCK translatable fields. It should be possible to build 'multilingual support' into these configurable content types on a per field basis. So we'd only need to define which ones of the fields should be translatable, and then it could keep separate values for each language
• Meta-nodes - and meta-objects in general -. This implies having content objects, mainly nodes, that are not displayable by themselves, but a grouping of other nodes in different languages. With these, it should be possible to have all the nodes of the same translation set – all of them are translations of each other- going through the same workflow as a single object. I.e. the admin promotes a 'meta-node' and all related nodes are promoted.
• Multilingual object as a new content type. We'd only need a new node type that would be a multilingual object in itself, having different fields for different languages. This could be easily implemented with the current node system, and be quite straight forward. The only main problem for now is the node title, which is kept as a single string in the main node table and is widely used for node listings.