One of the goals of Drupal 8 Multilingual Inititive is to refactor Gettext file handling by a component. The first effort was Make gettext .po generation its own abstracted functionality by Gábor Hojtsy, Sutharsan, fubhy, sun and clemens.tolboom While I (clemens.tolboom) was working on that issue I skimmed over the Translation component delivered by Symfony to see whether we could match their architecture (why reinvent components?) or even take over their components.