Menu Links: Store normal path or alias to menu_links table?

i recently worked on a multilingual project using drupal 6.3 and just found that there's something need to be changed or improved in drupal's multilingual support.
for example, i want to add a primary link "about us". first i creat a page with url path 'about', then i went to 'site building'->'menus', add a new menu item titled 'About' and pathed 'about' under primary links and then successed with system showed a message like this

The menu system stores system paths only, but will use the URL alias for display. about has been stored as node/49.

then i enabled translation for page, made some translation to other language for example chinese.

and then i enabled the switch language block and did some test. if i switched to chinese and click the 'about us' menu, it still show the english version due to its link pointing to node/49 and that's the english version.

then i tried contributed module i18n. if i enabled the i18n module, when switching to chinese, the menu 'about' is just disappeared because i18n module did some filter with its hook i18n_db_rewrite_sql().

so what's the solution?

solution no.1.

you can add each version of menu item to the menu links. for example, if i add an item 'about us' pointing to node/49 and another item 'about us' pointing to node/50(supposed this is the translation version of node/49) and enabled i18n module, then it worked as you expected.

the problem of this solution is that you must do some duplicated work. if you want your system to support more languages, you have to add more and more menu items. this solution is ugly.

solution no.2.

in drupal 6.3, path alias uniqued by name and language. for example, i could have an alias 'about' in language 'english' pointing to node/49, also an alias 'about' in language 'chinese' pointing to node/50. so if i store my menu item link with 'about' but not 'node/49' to the table menu_links, then i can get the right version of language when clicking the menu item, because function drupal_lookup_path() will pick up the most fitting source according alias name and current system language selection. to get this done, we need to modified the file menu.inc in include directory and menu.admin.inc in module menu. i made a patch and did some test, this works for me.

so my question is should we change the currently store type from normal path to alias in menu_links table?

sorry for the bad english.