What about a language user preference

Its unlikely a newbie will find the appropriate user settings without having read the faq first. :-)

Can nodelets be current-node-sensitive? If so a "translations" nodelet could indicate which other languages the current doc is available in

Interesting idea, but its a bit ambitious. It would require pmdev and godly intervention. And considering the amount of time the gods have for reviewing patches these days I doubt its a good plan.

at the top of the site FAQ, next to the author and date, it may say English Francais Deutsch etc.

So we would have a set of tranlation links at the top of the page to see a version of the FAQ page that is translated to that langauge? Ok, but this is my problem. currently we have about 8 translations from a set of about 50 documents and those 8 are in a signle langauge. So we would have alink to a page with only 8 translated links on it. If I were not a native english person and I clicked on the approparite links I would be pretty ticked to find less than 1/8th of the master document.

I guess what im trying to say is that if we had volunteers (with follow through) that would ensure the whole FAQ was translated then this approach would be fine. But as long as its a smattering of translations here and there it seems better to me to put links to individual translations as we otain them.