# Replacing site texts efficiently?

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/replacing-site-texts-efficiently/366925
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [May 20, 2025, 9:48pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/replacing-site-texts-efficiently/366925 "2025-05-20T21:48:22Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 8

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### Author: ![merefield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/merefield/32/176214_2.png) [@merefield](https://meta.discourse.org/u/merefield)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2025, 5:38am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/replacing-site-texts-efficiently/366925/8 "2025-05-21T05:38:51Z")

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> [@alkah3st](#):
>
> this file is what the app interprets to populate the database with the actual values?

No, I don’t think so.

This doesn’t hit the database (I think it would be too slow).

I believe most of the locale stuff is processed in memory for speed, using Redis as a cache (happy to be corrected on that).

the only thing that gets stored in the database are your modifications (in the table `translation_overrides`), which will be read when you initialise the app or piecemeal when you make a single modification whilst online.

I would just point out a couple of things:

- increasing the number of modifications significantly might extend your app initialisation time (I’m not sure anyone has benchmarked this).
- these may become an administrative pain to maintain as Discourse evolves but maintains its own nomenclature. You are inventing work for yourself here.
- given it’s now arguably the most popular forum platform, lots of people already use at least one Discourse site and are very used to the nomenclature, so maybe consider not confusing your users by changing what they’ve already got used to back to prior norms?

Also see:

> [@Terminology: topics vs threads](https://meta.discourse.org/t/terminology-topics-vs-threads/63390/3):
>
> Thread is a technical computer geek term, also it implies threading. So worth avoiding for both of those reasons.

> [@alkah3st](#):
>
> Categories → Forums  
> Subcategories → Subforums

This implies that each Category has its own administrators, URL, settings, purpose … e.g. Meta is a forum. It is not made up of several forums … I’m really not sure how you’d argue that? But I digress.

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