BuddyPress.org

It would be impossible to make words like “Group” into an admin-configurable option on a text-heavy software like BuddyPress. In English, we might be able to get away with creating a singular replacement and a plural replacement, but not all languages work this way. In Russian, for example, a word might be in a different form depending on which grammatical part of the sentence it is. For this reason, a simple variable substitution for a widely-used word like ‘group’ can’t work. It has to be on a sentence level, which is essentially what the .pot method provides.

I sympathize with those who have a hard time getting Poedit up and running – I don’t find it that easy to use myself. But I disagree that a language file is the wrong way to solve the problem. To me it seems like exactly the right, and only, way.