I tried to eat our own dogfood this AM. Below is an account of what I found.
What I tried to do was to create a translation of my page
Alain Désilets on the site, into French and Spanish
Snag #1
The page
Alain Désilets did not have a language assigned to it at the start.
I clicked on Translate button, and saw a pick list of languages. I selected French, thinking that this would specify the language of the translation.
Unfortunately, this was a case where the source page did not have a language associated with it, and this picklist was for specifying the language of the source page. So I ended up with a source page in French.
Now, as it turns out, there was a message above the language picklist that said:
"No language is assigned to this page. Please select a language before performing translation."
But it was in a microscopic font. And since I was in a translation mode, as soon as I saw the language picklist, I assumed it was for specifying the target language. In order to counter that assumption (which I think many users will have), we need to display a
much more prominent WARNING: style_ message.