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Multilingual wikis like Wikimedia Commons face the problem that people who don't speak English have a hard time navigating the Wiki. Specifically, categories are generally named in English, because maintaining a parallel category structure for each language would be impractical.

Quite a while ago, I dreamed up a way to solve this (the corresponding patch is stale by now i fear): the idea is to show a translated title for each page, in addition to the "real" (usually English) name. The translated title would be appended to the title at the top of the page itself, when the page is shown in a category listing, and maybe other listings on special pages (the search page would be especially interesting). It would also be nice (though more tricky) to show the transated title in tooltip shown for a link when the mouse hovers over it.

Now to the question where the translated title should come from. One way would be to simply use any inter-language links present on the page. So if the page Horse had an inter-language link to article Pferd in the German Wikipedia, users with their interface language set to German would see "Horse - Pferd" at the top of that page, and when the page Horse is listed in a category. However, this doesn't always out work quite like this. Inter-language links (especially between categories) often go to broader topics, or to categories that have a similar topic, but not quite the same. Or several sub-categories have link to the same category on another wiki, because that category isn't subdivided there. Still, the "translation" from the inter-language link would be better than nothing in most cases, and would perhaps also be a useful fallback.

The alternative is to let users explicitly provide translated titles for a page, using something like <title lang="de">Pferd</title>. The tricky question is where to store that data - there's no place for it in the current database schema. I think it would be nice to have a general purpose metadata-blob attached to the page record, so extensions can easily attach information to pages, without having to change the database schema.