I am very much for internal DSLs for functional testing, but have never seen the point of external DSLs (it feels wrong that anyone but the implementing team could or should create or maintain them). I passionately believe you should refactor and use abstractions in your test code thought, and in my experience that ends up looking quite like parameterised steps (again, in code rather than English preferably).

We did a lot of this where I work to make using cucumber easier, and when we later stripped cucumber out it still was incredibly useful.