With the number of documentation translations growing, the current system becomes less and less sustainable: if I now update an English tutorial, translators will have lots of trouble spotting the changes and updating their translations accordingly. It basically amounts to manual comparisons, which means the translations are likely to almost always be out of sync with the original.
How to fix this? I thought about the switch element:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/struct.html#SwitchElement
Inkscape needs to support it (it doesn't yet) at least for the systemLanguage attribute. Then, all translations of a tutorial can be stored in one file. A translator would select each text obejct (they will need to be converted to flowed text objects, by the way) and use a command to add an alternative for his language, then type the translation. Illustrations would be shared across all languages. This way, if a new section is added but not translated yet, users of a non-English language will still see this section in English, which is better than not seeing it at all. Inkscape could provide additional help by storing the last-edited timestamps in switch'ed objects, so that a translator could find sections where the original is more recent than a translation.
What do you think of this idea?