Great post. Glad to hear that you are seriously considering what is being said.

I don't know much about AJAX, but I found this link with an explanation of what goes on AJAX is "Asychronous Java Script and XML". Click on their demo button to see a dynamic graphic loaded to an existing page without a complete page reload.

I've only done very simple playing with Mechanize::Firefox, but I was able to talk to Firefox from Perl. The idea seems to be to let the browser run the Javascript and then monitor with the I/F what has happened. I think you can get a callback when the part of the page you are interested in changes. That way you don't have to poll Firefox, just wait for something to happen.

If you are just watching what Firefox is doing while displaying the page, then you aren't adding any more traffic than what the webpage does on its own. This short AJAX message to update part of the page will be considerably faster than a complete page reload which I think is what you are doing now. So if done right, you should get faster answers while at the same time not generate excessive traffic to the site.

I will defer to the Mechanize::Firefox experts, but I think this is possible. Sounds like you will have to understand the JavaScript in the page, but its not clear to me how much JavaScript you will have to write yourself. Firefox does the "heavy lifting" and you just watch what it is doing.

I do suspect that these folks will implement procedures and possibly api's to help them manage a process that protects their brand from bad translations or undependable translators, etc. I worked for a while for a German company and all of the engineers spoke English to one degree or another. The professional translators did an amazing job on the documents. The proper English translation wound up being about 30% shorter. A computer cannot do that - its just too complicated. And the translator has to be a native English speaker.