Yes, loc_press_a is a piece of text informing the user to press a specific key, it’s also something that needs translating and may need to be in multiple assets. So the text would be, in that specific case, ‘press start to continue’ and the context is identical wherever it’s used. A better solution rather than insisting everything, even identical strings, becomes a unique entry in a po file is to allow an asset to choose a namespace.
The implementation as is, if you try to put a namespace and key into the advanced settings, what you get is namespace=‘mynamespace [GuidFromAssetName]’ with a key that appears randomly generated. Just try getting access to a specific string across assets, it’s impossible. In 4.13 the text itself became the namespace+key so ‘press space’ appears only once for the translating team.
A workaround is to pop the ftext values into a widget class that’s used across all the UI. Not ideal.
Having identical text duplicated many times in the po files is just unusable for localisation and prone to errors. I agree context is important which is why we prefer to use a token method with an example English string.