Ok, I'll give some background about our program, because maybe we are doing it
the wrong way. The idea is that we have factories (and also other objects, but
the XML-file is quite similar for those) that can be provided by the user at
runtime. They just have to write a java-class and a xml-file which contains
some parameter-info and also the name of the type of graph that will be
constructed and some info about the parameters. Now we want to generate help
files from those xml-files. The most basic idea to start with is that you have
a title that contains the factory name and beneath that we also want the info.
We allow the user to provide the translation they want, therefore it is
necessary that we follow l10n rules.

but why are you looking it up in the locale dictionary? I thought that
you would have some text (or element) somewhere in your main document
flow and when you find that element you need to look up the
locale-dependent text.

Are you saying that everywhere you have locale dependent text then all
the alternatives are placed in-line at that point? If so you don;'t need
to use a key to look up the text in a dictionary, as you are already at
the right entry,