How is this expected to work?
You merge security fixes that contain text changes right before a new version is released.
That worked when there was main and stable which were supported and both were available on Crowdin. But it wasn’t possible to translate the latest security fixes for 2025.12 because the release of 2026.1 happened at the same time. In this case, it isn’t that much of a problem because it seems no text was edited, only new ones were added that stay untranslated, since 2025.12 isn’t supported for that long, I think that isn’t an issue. But what if a text would have been edited? Then the existing translations won’t be removed because translations are no longer updated. And while this is probably somehow still not that much of an issue because there aren’t many forums expected to stay that long on 2025.12 after 2026.1 is released, I am worried about how it will work with the ESR.
In summer, we had a broken text for the solution on hosted forums for weeks because the placeholder was changed in the code, but the translations still used the old one because this hadn’t been officially merged, so the text wasn’t changed by Crowdin. I am worried the same will happen with the ESR. It will receive all those security fixes, but after 2026.2 is released, translations won’t be updated. If you change a text in one of these fixes, the translations won’t be updated through Crowdin. So the text containing a placeholder that is no longer provided by core will stay unchanged.
Also, in general, the feeling that translations need to be perfect within the next few weeks because after that I will lose the chance to improve them, doesn’t feel good. Before, it felt like “well, whatever I add will help everyone who updates their Discourse after these are merged, and if I notice something I’d like to improve, they will all receive those improvements;” now this soon excludes everyone using ESR. They won’t receive updates once 2026.2 becomes the release.
Therefore, there are translations for each release which results in texts that were rewritten after a few weeks because the interface was refined, needing translations for both versions. I translate
js.category.visibility.more_options_hint: More permissions available in <a href>advanced settings</a>.
and
js.category.visibility.more_options_hint: More permissions available in js.category.visibility.more_options_hint_link: advanced settings.
In this case, I would assume the latter is the one needed for the ESR, so I guess there will be forums that update after a security fix is merged and actually see these translations. But what if this happened next month? How many forums do you expect to stay on 2026.2 and not just update right after it was published and there are new security fixes which notify the admin but a week or so later when I had time to translate the texts? And how long do they use them until they update to 2026.3? That is what makes me feel that I translate texts barely anyone will see.
It also feels like the translations that were removed from latest last week after the first update of the translations happened since the release of 2026.1 are related to the new process, and I wonder if the same will happen to translations after the next release. And it feels wrong that translations are available for those on 2026.1 but those using latest no longer have them.
These are the translations for Horizon on 2026.1
And this is available on latest