In previous discussions this was deemed unnecessary. Has something changed? Regular user account is enough to make changes to translations in translatewiki.net and you will get patches two times a week.

The Android team is in a period of transition, currently with two new engineers coming up to speed, and @Niedzielski (who used to take care of this) having left to work on the Readers web team.

I am following the process here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Translation_of_app_string_resources

If it's changed, that doesn't appear to be documented anywhere.

@Niedzielski: do you have time for a chat with @cooltey and me sometime this week about what the current process is? He will be taking this over going forward.

o/ @Mholloway, AFAIK @Nikerabbit now does all the TWN syncs. When there's a breaking issue, the change can be amended prior to committing to master. The wiki page documents the old manual process of performing a sync but it was no longer necessary for Android and iOS after we added support to l10n-bot for GitHub and opening a Gerrit patch without auto-+2ing. If you'd like to chat about the process, I'm happy to, but I suspect the TWN folks will be able to answer questions with more detail.

OK, let's close this as declined, then.

I surmised that some additional step must be needed because we've been getting a substantial number of translations for strings that have been deleted from the default and -qq files, necessitating translation cleanup patches like this:

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/378342/
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/368840/

(@Nikerabbit, you commented that deleted strings are synced "only if some other change triggers an update of a translation file" but I'm not sure what this means. What additional step(s) do we need to take beyond deleting the string in the default (and -qq) language in order to prevent them from continuing to be translated?)

Thankfully, this morning's L10n-bot patch appears not to have introduced any additional unused translations.

If you are seeing new or changed translation for deleted strings, that is a bug.

Here is an example timeline:

1. Patch that deletes a string is merged to git
2. Import at translatewiki.net picks up the change
   1. Import is initiated by cron, currently 9 times a day
   2. If there are are only added/deleted strings, then the change is effective immediately and the string is no longer available for translation
   3. If there are changed strings, update is pending until I or some other volunteer checks the change, with or without manual processing
3. Translator updates a translation for language a
4. I start an export that updates language a, but not b because it didn't get any other updates
   1. I try to run export two times a week: Mondays and Thursdays

If language breceives any update, the translation for the deleted string will then get removed on next export.

This is not intentionally so, it is just side effect of our performance optimizations and nobody has looked whether that could be easily fixed.