Drupal-Joomla Forum Importator

I have a question about the way drupal uses translations. From what i understand,
all translated strings are saved in the database, which (IMHO) might slow down
sites with a LOT of traffic.
I'm just wondering if how can i alter drupal's behavior so that instead of looking up the
translated string in the DB, it would look it up in a file. This way, once the file cached on the server,
things should run faster.