In a manual catalogue production, translation can be very resource intensive. It can be handled in many different ways, all of them either cumbersome or expensive. If you have translation staff in your markets you can send them PDFs of your master language catalogue and have them write their translations on digital post-its and send them back to have your layout artists copy the translations back into the layout documents and format everything again. This requires almost as much proofing as the original page production. You can also equip your translator with their own copy of InDesign, InCopy or QuarkXPress and send them your layout documents so they can translate them on their own. Or you can send everything off to an external agency and let them do the work. Either way you end up with translated text being locked in the page layout documents which makes reuse for other channels difficult.
With a content management system your translators can translate all text directly in the database. Clever workflows with todo lists help them find exactly which texts need translating. And it is not limited to product text; page level texts such as headings can be translated in the same way. You can even give your translators limited styling capabilities that allow them to highlight selected words in for instance bold or italic, following the master language version of course.
If you don't have any translation resources of your own, then you can export translation files from the system to an external agency and then import the finished translations when you get them back. This export/import process can be fully automated and driven by workflow states in the database.
Now, when the master language catalogue is approved and all text has been translated in the database you can import the translations into separate language layers in your layout document with minimal effort. You can then select an appropriate price list for that language and update all the prices in the layer. This entire process can be automated completely with Traxtion. You just select the pages you want translated and the languages and price lists you want and it is all done automatically regardless of if you need 2 or 25 language versions.
If you have trained your translators exceptionally well to match their translations to the length of the master text then your pages should be done. In most cases though, your layout artists will have to do a final touch up of the language pages to make sure that all text fit the boxes nicely and doesn't overflow anywhere. Then you just create language PDFs and let the translators proof them. If they need to correct anything they do so in the database and you only need to update the documents with the corrected text and you can send everything off to print.