The thing is, Moodle's language packs are in a custom format. Moodle's get_string() implementation is usually faster than gettext() and definitely more portable. So there are good reasons for doing things this way.
On the other hand, the rest of the world is using PO files, and many tools have appeared to work on PO files online or on desktop apps. OLPC is using Pootle - an webbased PO editor - to allow community-driven translation. They want to use it on Moodle to get things translated alongside many other laptop-based and server-based apps.
So I am after a volunteer that could write a Moodle-langpack=>Pootle=>Moodle-langpack translator tool
Once the langpacks are back in moodle format, we can consider them for inclusion on Moodle.org -
There is a good list of languages that Moodle doesn't seem to have yet, I think these are not in Moodle:
Amharic, Aymara, Bengali, Bengali (India), Dari, Dzongkha, Friulian, Fula, Gujarati, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Kreyol, Macedonian, Malayalam, Maltese, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Quechua, Sinhala, Sotho, Telugu, Thai, Urdu, Wolof, Yoruba.
It also means that we can get help from the Ubuntu community too, which uses Rosetta.
Using tools like Pootle or Rosetta has some advantages over a program-specific system like Moodles langpack editor. For example, when you are missing a given string, it can tell you how the same string has been translated for another program, so translations of different programs gain consistency, and translators save time (and spot errors too!).
Useful links
Pootle homepage
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/
Pootle guide for OLPC volunteer translators
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pootle
Homepage for OLPC's Pootle
https://dev.laptop.org/translate/
Existing lang packs for Moodle
http://cvs.moodle.org/lang/
Edit: If modern versions of PHP's gettext are faster, it might even make sense to switch to gettext at some point, so this also buys more options going forward...