Translations:Help:Extension:Translate/File format support/50/en

The Translate extension is MediaWiki-based and every message is stored as a MediaWiki page, so the key must be a valid MediaWiki page title. Mangling takes care of this by escaping the key names a manner similar to the quoted-printable encoding, but with some modifications before storing the message as a wiki page. Before the message is written back to the file, the message is unmangled.