[viljoviitanen]

It is the addon system. Language files only get loaded when the addon is loaded.

Well it COULD be done so that description is inside addon strings.xml, and then manually (or automatically by the repo building scripts or whatever) copied to the description xml that's loaded when browsing available addons. (The string would then be in two places, and technically not used by xbmc at all in the addon strings file.)

Btw, individual addon developers could actually already do it this way if they wanted. But since there has not been a central translation system before, it would not help much if addon descriptions were in the strings.xml file and it would make things a bit more complicated for the developer (and to me it seems not many addon developers care much about translations, because it's so hard getting them done in the first place and after that keeping translations in sync).

Monitoring files manually (and trying to figure out the needed new/changed strings) anyway is stupid, that's one reason there is a need for getting the system better. It has been discussed before, and actually to me that seems one of the most important reasons, if not the most important reason why the translation system needs improving. The very first tool I presented in the first post of this thread kind of tried to address this... but obviously it could not detect changed strings, just missing ones. The other reason is the "crowdsourcing" thing, making contributing to translations easy for anyone.