Hi,
during the 4.7 release cycle, I have been very active translation Drupal into my language (German). I thought that I'll share my experiences with it.
If I recall it correctly, there has been a "string freeze", meaning that strings will not change anymore from a certain date on. Unfortunately almost nobody cared about that freeze and strings were constantly changing. Having translated a string just find out that two days later, the string has been dropped or tweaked is quite annoying. In the first case, the work has been entirely superfluos, in the second case, you have to search the whole string for the parts that have changed - that can be even more sophisticated than translating the entire string anew. However, I have to admit that those string changes were necessary as they updated invalid URLs that have been changed from 4.6 to 4.7.
I suggest that we'll do a string freeze for the HEAD version one month after the code freeze. That would be October 1st. I think that this would give documentation patches enough time to get in after the code "freeze" (which is actually not a freeze as patches still go in, it's more of a "feature freeze") while giving translators enough time to update their translations for HEAD before it is released to the public. I urge all developers to respect that "string freeze" and only break it if absolutely necessary. That means, that all major documentation patches should get in before October 1st.
If you have any suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them so we can discuss them. I'd like to know if everybody is okay with the date or if we should push or pull it.
Regards, Konstantin