interface translation & locale_source and _target tables

we're trying to translate only the interface of our drupal site to another language (menu's "click here to read more", etc – NOT content).

i started off with the assumption that all string that we stick through a t() function in our templates (we did this in anticipation of this translation effort) would be found as BLOB in the locale_source db table, but that does not seem to be the case.

im basically trying to figure out how we can extract all strings to send to the translators. my idea was dump all BLOB's from the locale_source, send to translators and dump the translated strings in to the locale_target table.

obviously this isnt the best way to go about it?