localization, is it slow ?

hello,

first of all thank you for all your answers,
but I'm still a little confused.

Peter Damoc wrote:

why should it be incredibly slow?

As most of my strings are help texts,
which are often quit long (say 10 .. 20 full lines),
I would expect that searching for keys that are 10*80 characters long,
will be quit slow.
Although I don't know anything of the inside of Python,
I can't image that a lookup of a 800 character string in a dictionary is fast,
but maybe I'm missing some essential insight.

thanks,
Stef