I use the Translate extension very often, but many messages are hard to be translated because of the lack of syntax highlighting (like in Extension:CodeMirror). Could syntax highlighting be integrated in the Translate extension?
Topic on Extension talk:Translate
I find syntax highlighting useful on pages with heavyweight syntax like large commented-out blocks, templates and magic words embedded at multiple levels or many HTML/XML tags. None of these should normally happen in translation units (complex syntax should be either outside of the translation unit or within <tvar>s). If a particular message has heavy syntax, you can always click on Show in wiki editor and use syntax highlighting there. I’m not strictly against highlighting on Special:Translate, but I don’t see much point in it, and if it does happen, I’d like it to be separately toggleable from the regular editor.
Pages like this or this are very syntax-heavy and it is hard to identify the text that has to be translated. The same happens sometimes on Translatewiki.
Those are both good examples of what @Tacsipacsi is saying – the pages have been inappropriately marked up for translation with very large units that are hard to translate. This is less a problem with Translate as a tool, and more a problem with the way the tool is being used.