I encountered this “This message is used in a technical context. Do not translate it unless you are sure that all technical terms are handled correctly.” when trying to check out translatewiki, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this.
The issue here is there is almost zero context (aside from the string being “technical”), so the string is impossible to translate. Saying it is “used in a technical context” is meaningless and unhelpful; translators need full context — what’s before, what’s after, what’s the field, what’s the audience, how the string is used, etc. “Technical” can mean many things, and even within the same discipline the same “technical” term can be translated in different ways depending on context.
A previous “task” (I’m not sure if these are dummy strings or real strings), in a different language pair, gave useful context (heading in a table, and provided a link to the table in question); in that previous “task” if the context (the actual table) wasn’t provided the string would also have been untranslatable.
For reference, a normal CAT used in professional translation shows before/after context; and PO files (that are not stripped) show file names and line numbers, which we can use to locate context in source code. In both cases there are times even this level of context is insufficient and we’d have to see the layout or run the software to see how a particular string should be translated. The current CAT (“Tux”?) does not even provide the level of context provided by PO files.
Asking people to translate with no context is just asking for mistranslations. I was on Meta the other day and fixed a bunch of translations that were all mistranslated because there was no context and the previous translator guessed wrong.
(PS: I don’t know why I’m being taken to Phabricator.)