"Keywords instead of key characters" is a feature to the author.
While I like the abstraction of using English when programming I would like to keep it out of my text.
Yes. You could translate. But...
If memory serves, early 90's era document editors might not have used them in their file formats, but did have a display mode that used them (so you could figure out why that word keeps being bold after you've told it five times to cut it out)