Breaks sentences in wrong translatable units

I am not sure how to rate this plugin.

Positive: I really like the approach of being able to translate sentences from the front end. It’s easy and even users (my customers) who are not tech savvy will be able to translate their website. Using machine translations as a starting point is also very convenient. Also very good is that when you translate something like a button or sentence once, that same piece of text is automatically translated everywhere on the site. So Transposh makes it very easy to translate a website.

Negative: the biggest problem is that Transposh breaks sentences in translatable units where it shouldn’t break them. You can disable punctuation, number and html entity breaks but it doesn’t work correctly.

* Punctuation break: by default, it breaks for EVERY punctuation. Do at .,;: and even at ‘ so it breaks the wordt “Doesn’t” into “Doesn” and “t”. Now I can disable this punctuation break which makes it much better but it also makes a single translatable unit for the complete paragraph. Easy to translate, but as soon as you change a single thing in the source text, like correcting a spelling mistake, the complete translation is gone.
» Advice: a translatable unit should be a single sentence. So only break at the dot followed by a space at the end of a sentence. Or allow me to specify at which characters I want to break. That’s what professional translation tools such as SDL/Trados do.

* HTML entities break: even if it’s disabled, it will break for words with formatting like bold, italic, underline and with a hyperlink. The problem with that is that every language puts words in a different order, and with Transposh I can’t change the order of the words when a sentence is split up into different pieces because of text formatting. This sentence for example will be broken into 5 different translatable pieces: “textA boldtext textB hyperlinktext textC”.
» Advice: don’t break for words with a different format. Just add these formatting options to the translation box, that’s for example what the WPML classic translation manager does. Or use placeholders around formatted words, that’s for example what the WPML advanced translation manager (and professional translation tools) do.

The biggest WordPress tool out there (WPML) makes translation way too complicated, so I really do like the simplicity of the Transposh approach, but it’s just a little too simple to make it a great tool.