I'm not an expert in this area, but try looking at the Maketext modules. They seem to be a very Perl-ish solution to this problem area.

P.S.: I saw some comment in another thread about 'localizing $_'

That was probably a reference to dynamic scoping with local() rather than localization.

P.P.S.: See also the perl.i18n mailing list and Sean Burke's article on Locale::MakeText in TPJ #13.