Two holes let English through the ratchet unseen.
A plural form en has no key for (Russian .few and .many, Arabic .two)
was compared with en's value for that same key, which never exists, so a
locale could copy en's text into exactly the forms a new plural group
needs and the count stayed put. Such a form is now compared with every
form en spells out for the group. A form en does declare keeps the exact
comparison: Italian "{count} file" is the Italian plural, not a copy of
en's "{count} file".
The // same-as-en marker excused any value in a Latin-script locale, so
one comment waved a whole copied sentence through. It is honoured only
on a value holding a single plain word, the case shared/CLAUDE.md
already describes. No locale carries the marker today, so nothing that
passed before fails now; the counts are unchanged.
The ratchet excused any value equal to en that held at most one plain
word, so "Settings", "Appearance", "Readability" or "Users" copied into
another locale were never counted, Japanese and Arabic included. Buttons,
tabs and section titles are mostly one word, so a feature could still add
26 English copies of its labels and stay green.
An identical value is now excused only when nothing ordinary is left
after dropping placeholders, markup, addresses, a listed set of product
names (BRAND_NAMES, which now holds one-word names such as Atlas, Immich
and Mapbox) and unit symbols (UNITS). A word that really is the locale's
own, German "Status" or French "Transport", carries a `// same-as-en`
marker on its declaration, which the catalogue reader now reports. The
marker is honoured only in Latin-script locales: a Latin word left in
Japanese or Russian is English whatever it says. Every locale folder
must be on LATIN_LOCALES or NON_LATIN_LOCALES, so a new language cannot
pass the rule unclassified.
The baseline is re-recorded from the narrower rule: the unmarked copies
go from 1252 to 3238, the marked fallbacks stay at 3157, and no entry
went down. This is the measured state under the new rule, not a raised
gate; translating, or marking a word that is genuinely the same, lowers
it with --update as before.
Maurice