Today I Learned: Translate custom (core) strings

On a site we're starting to build, Drupal's core "Sticky at top of lists" functionality isn't necessary (using Nodequeue for lists), but nodes need to be included or excluded from search results on a per-node basis. Rather than create a custom CCK field, and since we're building search (as usual) through Views, I decided the simplest answer was to rename "Sticky" to "Appear in Search Results," and filter accordingly in the view.

So how to do this? hook_locale() only works on non-English languages (see t()) and seems to define groups rather than strings.

The simplest solution, it seems, is to use settings.php (or in this case, a common.settings.php used by all the others). Like so:

Voila! It works even with the Locale module disabled. (It's not really needed since it's an English-only site.) And since the string is always run (by core and Views) through t(), it applies universally. It's still `sticky` to the database but that doesn't matter.