Show content translation language links in a seperate variable

I hope I'm putting this in the correct category.

I've made a subtheme from the Zen Theme.

Adding the translation content module I noticed that the links of the native language names are display at the bottom of the content, using the $links variable in the templates.
Now is this very inconvenient for my website design and I want to display those links above the content. Moving the print $links in node.tpl.php is off course no option, because that would make "read more" links also appear above the content.

So I started looking at the node.tpl.php file and added a "print $languagelinks" just above my content. And I started nosing around in the template.php file from Zen, found a zen_preprocess_node() function where I can insert variables into the node templates. I also found that the function translation_link() retrieves the translation links and displays them in the $links variable through the hook_link().

But I have no idea where to go from there...
In my template.php I can use the translation_link() function to retrieve my language links, but I have no idea how to make them displayed properly, because that just returns an Array.
And, if I would be able to display them, I would still need to "disable" the fact that they are also displayed throug the $links variable.

Can anyone help me out here? Thanks a lot!