Hi Micheal,
I think the final words should come from Tim who is the project coordinator.
Personally I think one more distro supporting TDE would be good news.
Anyhow just for your info, we currently support Debian stable. I use Testing for development and builds are available, while we do not build anything on sid.
TDE was born as a fork of KDE 3.5, so translation follow the same process as KDE (i.e. lots of pot files).

Cheers
  Michele