CCK translations do not appear

After much trial and error I discovered that translations made to CCK fields do not show up until you go and resave a CCK field somewhere. It seems that any field in any content type will trigger the translations to show. So this might not be a bug in translation table, but somewhere else, however the localization client doesn't seem to have this same problem. This was really hard to understand because it seemed that we would translate fields, try the refresh, try the update translations, but no joy. Then suddenly hours later the translations would appear!

Menu translations may have a similar problem, but we gave up on using translation table for them (related issue? http://drupal.org/node/409452 ) and finally used menu_clone http://drupal.org/project/menu_clone to make a primary menu for each language.