There where several reasons to do that. Read http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=118707, if you are interested in the long history
David Mudrak took on the job to create and implement the new workflow and tools (specs on http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Languages/AMOS) to solve the needs.
Today the Moodle translation site went live. The site is located at http://lang.moodle.org and is for now meant for language pack maintainers. The documentation is on http://docs.moodle.org/Translation_2.0.
For short:
You are not a language pack maintainer (see http://docs.moodle.org/en/Translation_credits): don't do anything yet
You are one:
* create an account on http://lang.moodle.org
* send an email to translation@moodle.org, saying that you created an account
* onces your account is configured to make translations, announced by an email, you will be able to start translation on Moodle 2.0
You want to become one: send an email to your language pack maintainer (see http://docs.moodle.org/en/Translation_credits) and ask him/her to send a request to translation@moodle.org.
Workflow:
* Use the Translator filter to show strings you want to work on
* Translate missing strings and/or update the translation
* The translated strings are put into a temporary area called stage
* The stage is destroyed when you logout. You have to explicitly commit the stage so it is saved permanently!
* Language packages are generated every hour and published at http://download.moodle.org/langpack/2.0/ , with nice completion graphs calculated
Please create an issue in the