title: Why do people use translation placeholders instead of plain English?
body: <p>Yes, this is the <strong>exact</strong> opposite question than: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4232922/why-do-people-use-plain-english-as-translation-placeholders">Why do people use plain english as translation placeholders?</a></p>
  
  <p>I used the standard gettext way for translation all the time but now that I'm doing frontend I realized that not only most libraries are using keys/placeholders but this is sometimes recommended (see <a href="https://www.i18next.com/principles/fallback#key-fallback" rel="nofollow noreferrer">i18next</a>) over using plain English.</p>
  
  <p>I haven't work much with placeholders but I find it difficult because:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>you have to invent unique placeholder names all the time, you need conventions</li>
  <li>maybe you want to reuse the same placeholder name so you have to find an existing one that matches what you are translating</li>
  <li>is it better to have all translations scoped per module or to have shared translations? I'm not sure</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>According to the doc of i18-next, it is recommended to use placeholders because:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>While this works and might reduce files to load it makes the
    management of translations a lot harder as you will need to update
    changes to fallback values in code and json files.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <ol>
  <li>I wouldn't use plain English to reduce the number of files to be loaded. This seems obviously wrong.</li>
  <li>JSON? What's wrong with PO/POT? There are so many tools for translators already.</li>
  <li>If a wording needs to be changed, all translations should be reviewed, so I guess it's kinda "good" that it would break the old translations, right?</li>
  <li>It seems easier to me that devs can focus on getting the English text right and translators getting the other languages right.</li>
  <li>I really don't see how it's a lot harder to use plain English. A real life example would be great.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>My guess is that there are pros and cons to both methods but I don't see the pros with placeholders so I would like to understand.</p>