thanks for all the comments. quite interesting what related issues a
question brings up :0

> There're other issues I considered, as the need to reboot apache when you
> change the .po files so they're loaded and the hit just for initilizing the
> system.

is this really the case? Wordpress and Drupal both use gettext and PO
files, and yet I cant imagine people in shared hosting restarting
apache...

in terms of performance, does the syntax suggested above:
{translate}some string{/translate}

mean that smarty cannot pre-compile the templates? (I'm not exactly
clear how all that works, so please bear with me! I think that the
template itself is converted to a php file, then each time a page is
displayed that uses it, things go a little quicker. but if there is an
area where possibly non-static content might be passing through a
function, this would mean the conversion to php also would happen
every time?)

also, for performance and clean templates, what about just using config files?

{#someString#}

of course, some kind of management GUI would be needed for building
the config files, but this isnt too big a deal.

tx,

/dc