Thanks for coming up with this posting. I'm glad that you offered your help. In fact, I have already toyed with the idea before that this might be the right stage to let translators in to start translating the docs, as the task is quite huge. However, I can still see a lot of docs changing before the final release, which would cause extra need for review of already-translated German versions.
Therefor, I propose some sort of organized translation: I would like to come up with a list of documents that are pretty mature and that will probably go into the release as they are, so those docs could be translated by you (or any other interessted user) right away. So basically, this needs some coordinated effort by a team of translators.
Here's my proposal: I will use this thread and come up with a first list of files that can be translated. You (or others who would like to contribute by translating) check an individual document out by replying to the "official" translation thread (which still needs to be created; could be lead on the German sub-board once we figured out how to deal with translations) with something like "I will translate docs/de/foo_bar.html. If you do, the document-translation-task is considered to be taken by you. Once you're done translating, you attach the document to your reply and I will check it in into the core. You can then pick the next document if you want to.
A similar thing could be done for others languages as well, so I would like to use this thread as a base (in English) to discuss the way how to organize our effort.
Does this sound like a good idea?
I'm looking forward to hear from you.
Joachim