Text elements are the texts that appear on the selection screen or output screen of an ABAP program. They can also be used to replace any literals in ABAP programs.

Text elements comprise

You can store these text elements outside the program in language-dependent text pools. Your program automatically uses the text elements of the user's logon language.

You can create and maintain text elements without changing the program coding. You can create standard text pools, which you can copy from program to program. If you consequently work with text symbols only and do not use string literals in ABAP statements, your program becomes language-independent. Only the text elements from the original language text pool must be translated to other languages.

The translation of text elements is fully supported by the ABAP workbench. From an existing text pool for the original language, a translator can create the text pools for different other languages.