Looking at the ChangeLog, it seems to me the 1.9.7 release
should go out fairly soon: a good number of bugs have been
fixed -- some of them crashers -- and some useful new
functionality has been added. And at this point we haven't
made any serious systemic changes that could be harboring a
lot of new bugs. (Which is not to claim that there are zero
new bugs, of course.)
I've recently updated the translatable strings, so if anyone
has time to update their translations, please do so.
As with the last release, the more testing people are able to
do beforehand, the better. However, I think this is not quite
such a high priority for 1.9.7 since the focus lately has
mostly been on bug-fixing.
Allin