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