Exercism i18n

Exercism's translated output, and the scripts and GitHub Actions that check it.

Status: Hungarian (hu) is a production target. locales/hu/ holds the website UI catalogs and the Ruby track; more sources and tracks land as they are translated. The scripts run against that tree and against a fixture in scripts/test.mjs. Translations are written by exercism/translator. CLAUDE.md says exactly what is real, what is stubbed, and which decisions are still open.

English is never stored here. It is read from checkouts of the repos it is authored in, through git objects. See ENGLISH-SOURCE.md.

Layout

locales/<locale>/website/backend.json     Rails UI strings         (+ backend.meta.json stamps)
locales/<locale>/website/frontend.json    i18next UI strings       (+ frontend.meta.json stamps)
locales/<locale>/metadata/<repo>.json     names, titles, blurbs of one source repo, keyed by
                                          slug (+ <repo>.meta.json stamps)
locales/<locale>/content/<ab>/<cd>/<rest>.<ext>
                                          one file per English git blob id: exercises,
                                          concepts, track docs, docs, blog, analyzer
                                          comments, problem-specifications

Content is keyed by the git blob id of its English file, so it has no staleness: an edit to English is a new blob id, which is a file that does not exist yet. Byte-identical English across fifty tracks is translated once.

Text that is not a whole file (an exercise's name and blurb, a track's key features, a docs page's title) is different: the website only ever shows the latest, so it lives in one keyed catalog per source repo, stamped per unit like the website catalogs. An edited blurb is detected per key and blocks its PR.

How the website consumes this repo

Pushing to main is the deploy. The website keeps a plain checkout of this repo on its EFS (at <efs_repositories_mount_point>/i18n, on main, sparse to the locales it serves), pulls it on every push through its webhook, and reads locales/<locale>/... straight from that tree, including the frontend catalog, which the website serves itself. The checked-out HEAD sha is the version it keys its caches on. There is no build, no upload and no copy in between: the layout above is the served layout.

Quick start

pnpm install                                  # one dependency: yaml, to read Rails YAML
pnpm test                                     # 51 assertions, including a fixture run of every script

pnpm source:checkout                          # fetch exercism/website main (blobless, no working tree)
node scripts/build-english.mjs                # flatten its English into .build/english/{backend,frontend}.json
node scripts/validate.mjs all                 # the CI gate
node scripts/coverage.mjs --content-repos=../ruby,../docs
node scripts/completeness.mjs --source-repo=../ruby --locales=<locale>

A sibling ../website is found automatically and read at origin/main, never at whatever branch is checked out. --source-repo=<path> and --source-ref=<ref> override both.

How work arrives

A PR in any repo that holds English opens an issue here once a maintainer adds the ready-to-translate label to it. That PR's i18n completeness check blocks its merge until this repo holds the translation for every locale in locales.json productionTargets, for new text and for edits. Closing the issue re-runs the check. The two workflows a source repo installs are in source-repo-workflows/, and are safe for fork PRs.

The queue is automated. .github/workflows/translate-on-issue.yml hands each new or rewritten issue to exercism/translator as one repository_dispatch carrying the issue number, and that repo translates, pushes here and closes the issue. No script here calls an LLM.

Nothing under locales/ is ever deleted: scripts/no-deletions.mjs refuses it, and an Allow-Deletions: <why> commit trailer is the override.

node scripts/<name>.mjs --help is not implemented. Each script's header comment is its documentation.