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by ziml77 1743 days ago
I was using Qt recently and saw that example code did that English keying. It's good that they're promoting creating translatable UIs, but I don't know if it's the right thing to do if they're encouraging people to do it by using English text as the key.
1 comments

I think that approach is quick and easy for an English only developer to understand and do, but it's hard to get quality results. A synthetic key tied to the context so the same English text can be translated differently as appropriate.

Tools that show translators the application context are really helpful, too. Bulk translation in a spreadsheet is an OK place to start when there are a lot of new translations to do, but everything needs to be checked where it's used as well. Especially for languages that tend to result in layout issues when added to formerly English only apps, like German (lots of very long compound words) and LTR languages like Arabic.