I ship a release tracker called Verdict. It watches 37 technologies, and for every release that matters it writes a summary with an explicit verdict: action required or safe to upgrade . Last week I translated its interface into five languages: English, Italian, French, Spanish, German.

The content it shows cannot be translated. That single constraint decided almost every other thing in this work.

Why the content stays in English

Two kinds of text live on a release page, and neither one can be translated.

The release notes are the project's own words, kept character for character, because every claim in a summary points at the line it was read from. Translate the notes and the pointer points at nothing: the one check a reader can run on an LLM's output stops working.

The summaries are generated. They are already the expensive part of the product, and every extra language would be one more model call per release.…