There's nothing wrong with the .NET resource system with culture-specific satellite assemblies etc as such. The bigger problem I see is lack of tooling and services for translation by non-developers, volunteers, professional translation bureaus etc. You can't expect them to fire up Visual Studio, clone your repo and start editing resx files. Especially as there's not even a translation view! With .po files, there's a ton of editors, online services, translators etc available.