At the moment, probably yes. As I pointed out earlier, there already was an attempt to establish at least a German thread here, and it more or less failed.

I also share your concerns about what you call a "knowledge management meltdown", given the relatively small size of the community ATM. (As an example, from what I read in his profile, fanoush is from the Czech Republic. I very much doubt it would have been a good thing had he found a Czech subforum here from the very start and only participated there...)

On the other hand the current situation (and again, I'm not referring to ITT only, but to the whole information infrastructure we have, from the Wiki to the maemo.org static pages to the package descriptions in extras to this forum...) scares away people who don't feel comfortable enough with English or don't understand it at all. I'm convinced this makes for a bad user experience. (Just imagine you never have access to all the information offered here and in the Wiki etc.!)

Personally, I think information exchange at a higher level (=less participants worldwide, people who are used to English because it's used in other areas as well) should remain in English only because it helps to bring people together. This would certainly include everything that's currently accessible via maemo.org.

Language-specific subforums here may be an experiment if they can be done without much effort, but I still doubt they'd easily reach the audience they should be intended for: after all, you'd need to navigate through an English site before you reach the sub-forum, an even if we overcome this, it might simply be not attractive enough in terms of content at first. (chicken/egg)

The ideal solution should be a low-level site (a little like tablet school) that's attractive to those who never had access to the information we take for granted meanwhile because we follow the existing resources for years.
Static content, maybe a wiki, most of it probably directly taken and translated from existing English sources. This site would then have a forum of its own (or link to a language-subforum here, whatever), so that people have something to talk about (like "I tried cloning to SD yesterday, but I don't see my video files any more now").

There should also be a way to add language-specific descriptions to packages that show up in the application manager. If this can't be done (and is not "fixed in Fremantle"), the language specific site could as well provide a list of applications automatically taken from extras and translate the package desciptions so people can read them online. Better than nothing.

The goal of all this would be to give people access to everything the NIT can do that's not described in the Nokia manual, enhancing the user experience, helping to make the devices and the platform popular.
The downside: Right now, because we lack such resources, people who would need them might probably already have sold their tablets again. We'd invest a lot of work to create these sites, maintain them, and I bet it'll be more than a year until there's enough users who visit them.

Also, I don't know what Nokia is up to with maemo.nokia.com... Will there be a maemo.nokia.{de|fr|es|..}? Will it be the "come here and discover what else your device can do"-thing for all supported languages? Or will it be English only again?