I never understood why people think this is a good idea. The exact same sequence of letters in an English phrase, which you would like to use instead of IDs, can mean two different things in two different places - and those two different meaning could have different forms in other languages. Denormalizing translation database like that seems semantically incorrect (and strikes me as programmer laziness).
I agree that in general, more granular is worse for translations - there's too much risk your split will pierce the contextual whole that's required for some translations.