We at gildot are still dedicating time to the Portuguese localization of the slash 0.9 code.
A nice thing I bumped into was the translation of troll and lame, my sugestions (for those who can understand it) were chato and trengo. They are not linear, but its a lot more fun to try some inovation.
Before deciding to localize slash code we pondered the option of building some forum code from scratch. Some potentially interesting idea was the possibility of having a trusted subset of users helping with the classification of submissions (as this been done ?), while leaving the final decision to the formal editors. Another thing was designing the database so that a later stage could try to provide replication of the site.
A possible replication policy was something with write propagation of comments that keeps the partial order of observed comment context. I love replication and partial orders, so this must be my biasing working :)