Why do people use plain english as translation placeholders?

Question

This may be a stupid question, but here goes.

I\'ve seen several projects using some translation library (e.g. gettext) working with plain english placeholders. So f

Answer 1

Quite old question but one additional reason I haven't seen in the answers yet:

You could end up with more placeholders than necessary, thus more work for translators and possible inconsistent translations. However, good editors like Poedit or Gtranslator can probably help with that.

To stick with your example: The text "Please enter your name" could appear in a different context in a different template (that the developer is most likely not aware of and shouldn't need to be). E.g. it could be used not as an error but as a prompt like a placeholder of an input field.

If you use

_("Please enter your name");

it would be reusable, the developer can be unaware of the already existing key for an error message and would just use the same text intuitively.

However, if you used

_("error_please_enter_name");

in a previous template, developers wouldn't necessarily be aware of it and would make up a second key (most likely according to a predefined wording scheme to not end up in complete chaos), e.g.

_("prompt_please_enter_name");

which then has to be translated again.

So I think that doesn't scale very well. A pre-agreed wording scheme of suffixes/prefixes e.g. for contexts can never be as precise as the text itself I think (either too verbose or too general, beforehand you don't know and afterwards it's difficult to change) and is more work for the developer that's not worth it IMHO.

Does anybody agree/disagree?

Answer 2

We've been using abstract placeholders for a while and it was pretty annoying having to write everything twice when creating a new function. When English is the placeholder, you just write the code in English, you have meaningful output from the start and don't have to think about naming placeholders.

So my reason would be less work for the developers.