Shoutbox

I've been misunderstood. All your points are, seen isolated from my suggestion, ok. But:

All I wanted was a feature that the translator could turn on if he wanted to, thus making some of your objections irrellevant. A simple feature. No boxes would be required, instead the small picture assigned to the subsection (at the left side of the screen) could be slightly altered (if the feature was turned on), e.g. showing a small ampersand with a red X on it.

I never wanted the feature to be able to detect other symbols, like the %, and it is quite irrellevant, since no presence of symbols would chance the subsection's status as "containing ampersand" or "not containing ampersand". If the feature was included, it would mark translations without ampersands (where the original subsections contained ampersands), no matter whether or not the subsection contained other symbols.

And - no, it would not require any updates at all. If the program is able to detect &'s, that would be all:

Feature on? 1
Are there &'s in the original file? 1
Are there &'s in the translation? 0.
Red light and cross on.
Return.

Feature on? 0
End.

(The control could be carried out whenever a subsection was left by the translator; thus not in real-time. Alternatively, the feature could be just a button that would start a check-up of the entire translation, and then mark subsections in the overview window.)

Therefore, if the feature can be programmed, it would have no downsides. If it can't, well.. then it just can't.

Dismissing this is a violation of the basic rules based on Murphy's Law. But of course, the program wouldn't be able to place the ampersands itself; it would just make it less likely that they were not placed, and thus were missing in the sent-in translation. Errors would still be possible.