After T254484, untranslated messages will behave differently from messages translated with the very same content as the original. Some messages may not need changes in most languages, in page translation just as in software translation. By making them optional, they could be hidden by default in the translation interface and not marked as being in English (or whatever the original language is) when left untranslated.
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For example I wanted like to make c:Translations:Template:Proposed/i18n/cat/qqq optional so that people don’t translate it without having the category created. (@GPSLeo recently removed that message from translation, but if it can be made optional, probably we can agree to have it re-added.) Other (theoretical) examples include local number and date formats, punctuation etc., which is the same as in English in most languages, but some languages write them differently.
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Another actual example is m:Template:WMF Staff—people’s names are translatable to let non-Latin-alphabet languages transliterate them, but translating them makes little sense for Latin-alphabet ones (with a few exceptions like Gergő Tisza “translated” to Tisza Gergő in Hungarian, as this is the original, Eastern name order, name, which was changed to accommodate English readers).