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

There's a fallback hierarchy, from most specific locale to the unlocalised version in the source code.

So French in France might have the following fallback route:

1. fr_FR
2. fr
3. Unlocalised. Source code.

As a result, having proper English sentences in the source code ensures that if a particular translation is not provided for in step (1) or (2), you will at least get a proper understandable sentence than random programmer garbage like “error_file_not_found”.

Plus, what do you do if it is a format string: “Sorry but the %s does not exist” ? Worse still: “Written %s entries to %s, total size: %d” ?