You can write MathML equations in a DocBook based document, by using the MathML Module for DocBook XML instead of the DocBook DTD.

dblatex now translates the MathML equations to latex by using the excellent stylesheets of the XSLT MathML Library by Vasil Yaroshevich. A large amount of tests from the W3C MathML Test Suite 2.0 is supported (657 of 712 tests). The test file used to validate the MathML stylesheets is provided in the package.