hi!
have you ever thought about using the uselang parameter
introduced with mediawiki 1.5 to change the language a bot
uses to parse mediawiki messages?
using a non-default language has one advantage:
the messages change much less often, because afaik only
people with CVS access can change the LanguageXXX.php
files, whereas normal messages can be changed by normal
admins on the wiki itself.
one could even write a LanguageBot.php which simply
returns the name of the message itself with some marker.
brion doesn't seem to like this idea, though ;)
at the moment i use uselang=nds for the jEdit plugin, and
it works just fine.
daniel