I found out a neat thing, tinkering with Navigation Strip today. If your layout contains $this->print_control_strip(); the navigation strip will appear in English, always to everyone. If not, the navigation strip is using the language settings of a remote user (or browser settings, if user hasn't specified anything or hasn't logged in). Russian for me.

Hm, that seems almost like a bug to me. It should probably always display in the remote user's language, right? I can probably fix it fairly easily, I think.

Yes, I think it would be nice if it displayed in remote user's language. If it helps, when the layout doesn't have that function, there's some script thing that makes the control strip appear. An example may be seen on support_general, which overrides Page::print() function to add tags in the sidebar, and as it was done before control strip, doesn't have it.

Can the built-in core function print_control_strip use the translation strings? There's a bunch that start with "web.controlstrip."