its definitely not sufficient. first of all i anyway need to know which sentence uses this "by" to change this "couple of words" in it. on the second there may be some sophisticated cases for dynamic sentences (if some part of sentence is generated by soft, even if this part is only some date or number).
If I understand it a little bit better now, a solution could perhaps be that AvikB creates several entries for 'author' to be used at different positions?
For example one 'author' that is only used in a situation to indicate the name of the author without usage in a sentence, and another 'author' that is used in the sentence 'plugin by author...'
Just suppose these two would be named 'author-name' and 'author-created', then for English (and Dutch ;-) they would be identical, but for Russian you would be able to differentiate them?
And perhaps you even need more than two different 'authors' for other uses?