I watched the youtube video and I really liked it. Then I saw your pointer to your site and went there... and I loved your music!... Thanks for sharing it!

About your modelling and rendering, it looks really good. Yes, translucency could be one way to go. You have to place a point light inside. One difficulty will be that the text should be brighter than the rest and because it's an alphaplane indepedent from the object, as far as I understand, that will require some extra work in faking the light. You could probably make the text a self-luminous material of the same color as the point light inside.

Another thing that could work, instead of translucency, and with less render time, would be a very slight transparency of the buttons material, plus a point light inside. Just 5% or so should do the trick. It won't appear transparent without the light inside but it will sort of glow when the light is on.