How Many More To Go?
You currently have 184 qualifying translations for MediaWiki core to Swahili, with 962 messages to MediaWiki core untranslated. The rules for the translation rally say you must translate MediaWiki core before working on other products. Given these two observations, you will still need to contribute 500-184=316 translations for MediaWiki core before you qualify for a share of the bounty.
What exactly is a message on this platform? I thought by hitting save it means that is a message gone or what exactly does save and go to next mean? In other platforms of translations I have interacted with hitting save means that is a string or few words translated and the number is deducted accordingly. It seems the count of MediWiki untranslated is not going down or up on the language stats page too for Swahili on this platform.
To the best of my knowledge as seen on this link I am past 300 valid strings for Mediwiki. I could be wrong though.
"save" and "save to next are basically the same thing. For the rally, only new translations (not changes to existing translations) count. Outdated translations count as untranslated.
You currently have 269 qualifying translations for MediaWiki core to Swahili, with 877 messages to MediaWiki core untranslated. The rules for the translation rally say you must translate MediaWiki core before working on other products. Given these two observations, you will still need to contribute 500-269=231 translations for MediaWiki core before you qualify for a share of the bounty. You have to keep translation MediaWiki core, until there are at most 877-231=646 untranslated messages left for MediaWiki core.
What if I do translations for a second language which I understand? Swahili has plateaued as far as my Swahili goes. It would need a language committee to come up with the technical remaining terms which are majorly computer-centric.
It would be awesome if you would be able to work towards getting that done for Swahili. The current situation is that we have an incomplete UI localisation, which isn't great for potential users of MediaWiki. We have very few contributors to Swahili, so I'm glad that you did contribute what you could. I'm going to make an exception and approve your claim. Please don't be a stranger, and keep coming back to contribute to Swahili localisation for translatewiki.net projects!