Hello Chris,
yes, it is true, we will be combining it with our new language editor component in next weeks. If you want to translate it manually you can use echo $VM_LANG->_('YOUR_DEFINED_FIELD_NAME_IN_YOUR_LANGUAGE_FILE');
You can set up the string in /administrator/components/com_virtuemart/languages/common/YOURLANG.php
Please don't use BOM for utf-8 as it leads to some incompatibilies.
We will change our component to use it's own joomla's language files, as preparation for VM2 which does not use VM_LANG any more.
Best Regards,
Stan