Newbie Question re: Translation Work Process

[Lin Surasky]

I'm posting this for a colleague who is not on the list. Both public and
private replies are fine... I'll pass everything along to her.
 
We have 30 FrameMaker docs and several Word documents. The docs have to
be translated into Spanish, Portuguese and Cyrillic. 
Our current solution is to convert the docs into OpenOffice files which
is XML based. Those files are then converted from .odt to .xlz and
imported into the translation tool (Open Language Tools XLIFF
Translation Editor). We do our translation magic and then take the .xlz
output from the translation tool and convert it back to .odt so that we
can process it in OpenOffice. Sounds like a good solution... if only
OpenOffice wasn't as buggy as Word. We could output the Frame content
directly to XML which the translation tool can deal with. However, can
we get it back into Frame cleanly? 
 
We are willing to look at other translation tools such as Trados. Trados
accepts .mif files. I suppose we can take the .mif files from Trados and
import back into Frame. However, it would be great to go the open source
way and stick to our current translation tool.
 
Anyone have any recommendations for either process, or a more efficient
third option?
 
Thanks!
-Lin