Exercism i18n

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

Status: a scaffold. locales/ is empty and locales.json lists no locale yet. The scripts all run, against nothing here and against a fixture in scripts/test.mjs. Uploading to S3, and the translator repo that would write into locales/, do not exist yet. 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.

Quick start

pnpm install                                  # one dependency: yaml, to read Rails YAML
pnpm test                                     # 54 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>
node scripts/publish.mjs all                  # build dist/; uploads nothing

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. 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.

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.