@Wladek92: Assuming this task is about the Translate extension itself, hence adding project tag so others can find this task when searching for tasks under that project or looking at that project workboard.

A potential solution to this is to disable parsing on Translations: namespace. Maybe there is a hook that can be used to set content type to plain text.

In T239017#5695251, @Nikerabbit wrote:

A potential solution to this is to disable parsing on Translations: namespace. Maybe there is a hook that can be used to set content type to plain text.

I often use

{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|Translations|{{speedy|not a translation}}}}

to get translation units consisting of copy-paste of the English original and other non-translations deleted without marking the whole translated page for translation (as it may contain real translation in other translation units). Also, every now and then I edit translation units using WikiEditor instead of Tux so that I can preview them (e.g. to see how language-dependent templates and parser functions behave.) Not parsing pages in the Translations: namespace would make these workflows impossible, and I’d very much like to keep them.

(By the way, there would certainly be a way to set the content type for a namespace: Scribunto, Wikibase and other extensions do exactly this. But the functionality loss is too big IMO compared to the gain of avoiding reference and other errors.)