Themes as child themes for better language support?

I am currently working on rebuilding the WordPress themes to make them up-to-date with the current version of WordPress. During this work, I have considered several additions to the themes. One important addition is support for other languages than English. There have been translated versions of my themes, but I have so far never used the internationalization and localization features that are built into WordPress. I started rewriting the WP-Andreas01 theme to support language files, but ran into the same challenge that prevented me from using the feature in previous releases: Any update I make to a text string inside the theme, may result in a need to update all translation files to ensure that the translations work as intended. Before I move on with the theme updates, I would like to ask for some feedback on an alternative solution that could make this challenge into a non-problem:

Would it be a good idea to rebuild the themes as child themes to the default WordPress theme (twentyten), with standardized text strings that makes the child themes work in all languages that twentyten is translated to? Or are there reasons why this would not work?

themes, wordpress