"These quirks aren't due to last-minute updates. Instead, it is all about the translations, according to veteran engineer Raymond Chen. "This deadline usually comes well before the engineering 'no code changes' deadline," Chen wrote on his Old New Thing blog, "because the translators require a lot of time to go through all the strings and translate them into the many target languages that Windows supports.""
""The reason is that changing those strings would invalidate the translations," explained Chen, "causing the existing translation packs to say, 'Whoa, that's not the string I was asked to translate.' "Depending on what language the user has chosen for their user interface, this could result in devolving to the base language (for Language Interface Packs), or if the base language's translation has also been invalidated, possibly falling back to English.""
Windows requires an early freeze of user-visible strings well before the engineering no-code-changes deadline to allow translators time to translate into many target languages. Once a string is released, Microsoft treats it as permanently locked and avoids changing it because edits would invalidate existing translation packs. Invalidated translations can cause language packs to fall back to the base language or to English. Microsoft adds new translations for updated functionality rather than replacing old strings, causing a buildup of abandoned strings and interface bloat. Only major releases provide an opportunity to purge redundant strings system-wide.
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