WordPress MU

I don't see this actually in use in the code. I'm surprised there isn't a lang-id to text conversion table. Has this field been deprecated?

I am currently converting 90 blogs of various languages. It looks like I need to specify the WPLANG in site options upon its conversion.

So I guess need to find the following .mo files:
de-DE
en
en-AU
en-CA
en-GB
en-US
es-MX
fr-FR
ja
pt-BR
zh-TW

Where would I look for those?

OK reading up on this all I've learned the following:

lang_id probably can just be ignored, it's only only there to confuse people writing scripts. ;)

.mo files files for the machine to read that are created by manually massaging .po files that are initially converted from .pot files that are machine created from the source code.

No one has taken the lead for internationalization in the WPMU project. Therefore there is no specific place to download individual .mo files nor packs of translations.

Some people report that WordPress .mo file work with WordPressMU. However, it is also clear that those files are missing things and are not really correct for WPMU.

It all that correct?

If so, I'm modifying my question to:
If you use a WordPress .mo file in WordPressMU is it true that all phrases shared between WordPress and WordPressMU will be translated? That means that most of the stuff for the individual blogs will be translated just fine. Yes?

Will I get 70%-80% there if I use WordPress .mo files? Or would it be better to copy an english mu mo file over for all of my needed .mo files?

I've consulted with the WordPress Polyglot list and have got answers to all of my questions.

I thought I would share them with the list, perhaps someone will some conclusive information useful. This information came from Nikolay, but has been paraphrased by me for this post.

1. Can a WordPress .MO file be used in WordPress MU?
Yes. The way the translation works, you simply pass in a string and it returns a translation or the original text. Since WordPress MU is based upon WordPress a large number of the phrases will be identical. It will not be perfect, however, a great deal of the strings wil translate correctly. For example on wordpress.com they started using these mo files and the translations were decent. Yes, they do not fit perfectly, but it is flying start.

2. Where would I look for the translations I listed above?

Usually at:
http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/
or more specificaly:
http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/$lang/trunk/messages/$lang.mo
or
http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/$lang/tags/$tag/messages/$lang.mo

If there isn't a mo file, usually there is at least a po, which is already translated and you can convert it easily to a mo with a command like "msgfmt lang.po -o lang.mo"

3. Will I get 70%-80% of the translation if I use WordPress .mo files? Or would it be better to copy an english mu mo file over for all of my needed .mo files just to avoid any missing file error messages?

You'll probably get an even higher translation rate as most of the phrases remain unchanged between WordPress and WordPress MU.

4. Is there another approach that should be used?

If you really want perfect translation, you could contact the WordPress translators (http://codex.wordpress.org/L10n:Localization_Teams) and propose them to translate MU also. Many of them will be happy to.

I'll also post this on TheCodeCave.com to help spread the word.