Isn't this basically what idx does?

Oh, sorry, this was dirty nonsense in my working copy. Thanks for catching that.

This was an alternate version of rP1984539: basically, if you have an extracted translation array like this:

array(

'apple' => null,

);

...that is, you haven't written any translations yet, then idx() will select the key and you'll get null.

An alternate version of this would be:

$translation = coalesce(idx($this->translations, $text), $text);

...but rP1984539 was a cleaner fix.