Hi Nicolas,
I knew that one was in developpement. It is called "PO4A" (see http://po4a.alioth.debian.org/). The support for the texinfo format has recently been added and the developper let me know, as I had asked him. This tools suite allows to parse the original texinfo formatted documents and thereafter use the po tools suite (gtranslate, kbabel or rosetta on launchpad.net or a combinaison of the 3)
I took a quick look at po4a and it seems like it could be a useful tool for the Maxima project. However since I am not actually making the translations, I will let the translators on the Maxima team weigh in with their opinions of po4a. If there is general agreement that po4a is useful, we could start using it.
Maybe you can answer some general questions about po4a. How does po4a change the development process? At present: edit .texi files, commit to CVS, execute "make" (to run makeinfo and texi2html). How does that work with po4a in the picture?
Thanks very much for looking into this topic for us.
Robert Dodier