Hi,
*Crossposting to Wikimedia-L, Wikitech-L, MediaWiki-L, and Wikitech-Ambassadors. You can reply to the mailing list, but the ideal place for further discussion is the talk pages of the wiki pages to which I link below.*
There's a new proposal to localize Lua modules in a more modern, safe, and convenient manner: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Translatable_modules .
In the foreseeable future it will only affect multilingual sites, such as Wikidata, Commons, Meta, and mediawiki.org, but at a later time it may also be deployed on Wikipedias and other projects.
It will be great if experienced module developers could take a look at the project page, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Translatable_modules , and its subpages, especially https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Translatable modules/Proposed solutions . Your feedback will be very helpful in implementing this project in a way that really benefits all the editors.
Thanks!
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore