translucency vs transparency

Seeing a recent reference to http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-color/ reminded me of a discussion that some of us at the last SVG Open had over dinner concerning the difference between transparency and translucency. At first I questionned the distinction, but then was reminded of the natural language differences between the terms and decided that the difference has to do with the material inside the medium through which light travels (and of course this made me think of some of the ways the <replicate> tag can be used to model the internal structure of a 3-D object such as http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/SVGOpen2010/color4.svg as seen in Firefox 4, Opera, IE+ASV or Chrome.)

Anyhow, I wondered if any of those who have been working with color models and various lighting filters have given thought to modeling translucency within SVG. The Mueller calculus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_calculus), Raleigh and Tyndall scattering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering ) and turbidity all seem to enter into the picture. I think modeling turbidity rather than light may be more within the natural purview of SVG, but would be interested in hearing what others might think.

cheers
David