Use complete sentence templates with placeholders

What it is

Complete-message formatting makes one user-perceived speech act a translatable template and inserts dynamic names, quantities, dates, or objects as placeholders. Complete means that translators can see and rewrite all words, punctuation, and grammatical dependencies in the utterance. It does not require an entire visual region to be rendered by one component.

Why it happens

A template separates fixed language from dynamic data: linguists control sentence structure while runtime supplies typed arguments. The target can move variables, change relational wording, coordinate a verb with a quantity branch, or recast the expression without altering business code. If fixed words remain in code or separate resources, placeholders merely replace concatenation syntax and do not restore the translation unit. Numbers and dates should use supported locale formatters. Use person-name formatting only with structured name fields supported by the platform and data model; otherwise insert the complete name as one semantic value without splitting or reordering it.

Where it stops holding

A complete message is not one giant string for a whole page. Independent headings, field labels, and actions have separate speech acts, accessible names, and change lifecycles. Arbitrary markup in rich-text placeholders introduces escaping, security, and untranslatable structure; component slots are safe only when their boundaries do not split target-language syntax. A template engine also does not automatically inflect every lexical item.

Applying it

• Define one resource per notification, error explanation, confirmation question, or action label, keeping all fixed words and punctuation inside it.
• Use typed semantic placeholders such as {fileName}, {count}, and {dueDate}; document source, example, and permitted formatting options.
• Let the message system handle plural/select variants and locale formatters; the application passes semantic values, not source-language fragments carrying suffixes.
• Enumerate every branch and argument extreme, validate omissions, unauthorized repetition, and type changes against the argument-occurrence policy, and obtain native review of grammar, escaping, and accessible reading in the final interface.

Related

• Same group: S1.06.1 Word order differs across languages · S1.06.2 Concatenated fragments cannot be translated correctly · S1.06.4 Placeholder order must be rearrangeable
• Adjacent: S1.04 Plural, gender, and grammatical variation · S1.05 Translation context and string reuse
• Search terms: message formatting · parameterized message · whole-message translation