>>>>> In <20020821193900.557945.FMU965@piglet.prv.splode.com> 
>>>>>	Noah Friedman <friedman@splode.com> wrote:

> Persistent hashtables might be useful for other things (such as BBDB), so
> they seem worth considering for reasons beyond localization.

Why don't you consider reading *.mo files themselves?  Even now gettext
0.11.5 has a support to Emacs Lisp.  I have used my gettext.el for that
purpose in my IRC client (Liece) for several years.

Here is the example:

;; Before evaluating the following expressions, it is needed to run
;; ./prepare.sh (attached below) to generate prog.mo in the current
;; directory and to type M-x load-file gettext.el (also, attached below).

(setenv "LANG" "fr")
=> "fr"

(bind-text-domain "prog" ".")
=> (("prog" . "/home/ueno/fr/LC_MESSAGES/prog.mo"))

(dgettext "prog" "'Your command, please?', asked the waiter.")
=> "«Votre commande, s'il vous plait», dit le garçon."