Menu Translation (Drupal 6)

I have been struggling to understand how i18n menu translation is intended to work in Drupal 6.... I was hoping someone could confirm what I think I have discovered....

It seems that:

1. Only custom menu items appear in the 'translate interface' list, not primary/secondary links

2. Although custom menu items do go through the translation engine, this does not help if you translate the node pointed to by a menu item ..... because ......

3. A menu item has to be created for every language (I thought I might be able to use URL aliases to avoid having to create a new menu item for each language, but I could not get this to work)

also .....

4. A menu item is selectively shown/hidden to the user depending on the language of its target .... so although the menu item itself has a "language" dropdown, it doesn't actually do anything (surely it does something? I can't find any affect of changing it!)

Can anyone help with a sanity check on these conclusions?!

Thanks!