Wrong Chains of Trust for German language website page

Dear ISRG,

was freaking out today until i noticed that:

and

are completely different in information level.

on German page, there is R3 still active. But every new cert is issued by R10/R11 - which caused an intermediate error for us and all our customers.

this is very very unhappy.
Would appreciate if you either shut down the german page or link the information to the english page!

thank you :wink:

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As far as I know, the site translations are a community effort. As you can see on Translating Let's Encrypt Website to German language - Crowdin, the certificates.md is currently just "4 %" translated, probably due to the outdated information.

You can help Let's Encrypt with the translation if you want using Crowdin :slight_smile:

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I agree the templates are problematic. I have opened this ticket - Update translation templates to reference the last canonical/english version's date · Issue #1954 · letsencrypt/website · GitHub - suggesting the header shows the last updated English version and offer links to it.

I don't think removing pages is a viable solution, because it would require people to audit each translated version and decide if that can still be used or not, whenever the english version is changed.

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I agree the stale information on the German language page is unfortunate.

But, R10 and R11 were deployed in June of 2024 so just over a year ago. All Let's Encrypt certs since then have used either R10 / R11 or E5 / E6 for ECDSA certs.

Would you explain more why this caused an error for you? Systems that "pin" an intermediate are highly discouraged.

To stay best informed you should subscribe to the API Announcement section of this forum. This is even more important for service providers. This ensures you see essential info such as this intermediate change: Deploying Let's Encrypt's New Issuance Chains

There are not many notices in that section so you will not be burdened with many emails.

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It's possible now to check (and update) translations entirely using AI but it does loop back to the argument of whether you should translate at all, or just provide the content in one language and let the browser translate.

Maintaining translations is a huge problem in software that actually blocks text improvements, well meaning contributors might give you an entire Traditional Chinese (zh-Hant) translation, but if you never see them again or they don't /can't subscribe to source text changes at the sentence level then those translations get outdated fast and you (individually) can't even read them to see if they are wrong. Multiply that by the number of languages (after all, if you provide one translation you should provide them all).

[Edit: although in this particular case it's probably best if the list was just defined in data as json and auto inserted as part of the docs build.]

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thank you all for the feedback.

I can see the translation is "community effort" - but I would definetely shut down wrong information rather leaving them there - for years!..
also the misleading point is, that the main pictures IS changed, but puts on more confusion to this topic :smiley:

the point from @jvanasco is nice, I agree to his ticket.
May it could be an idea to put on a BIG RED BANNER on the top of the page, if there is a comitt difference between the main one (englisch?) and the translation!

also agree @MikeMcQ - that is on our side, for sure. but stuff like this happens always, I'm sure there are more people wondering about this, but may are pissed of instead writing here and trying to bring stuff to a point :slight_smile:
I do watch API announcements now - thank's for the hint!

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I don't think the technology is anywhere near that yet. IMHO, humans proficient in both languages are still required to oversee and check translations. AI can significantly cut this time down, as it should now be mostly passive reading, but some writing is often required.

1 Like