Translations:Help:Extension:Translate/Page translation administration/29/en

Parsing order. Beware, the $translate tags work differently from other tags, because they do not go through the parser. This should not cause problems usually, but may if you are trying something fancy. In more detail, they are parsed before any other tags like $pre or $source, with the exception of $nowiki which is recognized by the Translate extension in some circumstances (such as rendering a page) but not in others (such as generating the list on Special:PageTranslation of pages containing $translate). If you want to have the literal expression "$translate" in the source text, you should escape it like "$code3".