How to write code that enables translation of variables in the database?

Hey Gabor, I couldn't remember if I asked about a solution for this problem when we met in Barcelona or not. Basically, a lot of Ubercart page titles, form element labels, etc. are customizable. Values are being stored in the database, but multi-lingual sites may still need to translate these stored values. I know I'm not supposed to use t() on variables, but is there any other option here to allow dynamic, multi-lingual strings?

The guys requesting these features for Ubercart have simply been hacking core, which obviously is bad. Multi-lingual sites are a subset of our normal users, so I'm not inclined to just do away with the core dynamic strings since they benefit so many of our single language users. But it seems like in this situation, the normal thing to do would be to hard code all strings and let sites that want to change text use the localizer (?) to do it. This option just isn't very user-friendly and doesn't seem to make things easy for the bulk of our users.