Ideally strings not shown to the user would also not be wrapped in pht(...) at all to avoid wasting translator's time. This is contrary to the documentation inherited from old upstream at https://we.phorge.it/book/contrib/article/internationalization/, though,

In T15903#18780, @pppery wrote:

Ideally strings not shown to the user would also not be wrapped in pht(...) at all to avoid wasting translator's time.

Notice that the error message here is expected to be shown to the user (in their own language) so this isn't the case here.

pht() also does some escaping, formatting, and other safety related stuff, and it's more convenient to use the same methods for all human-readable messages rather then "user-readable" vs "admin-readable".

But yes, the logs should not show up in the language of the user that triggered the exception - they should either stay proto-English, or translated to some selected system level language.

From a technical POV, I think we can't do that right now because pht() returns a plain string. We talked about making pht() return some kind of a lazy string-like object, so that translations (and formatting) can be avoided for strings that are not shown, and this might be another good use-case for that. I can't find the old discussion right now.

But also, I'd expect the log to come with a stacktrace that points to a useful line in the code?