Accelerating translations with continuous integration

For the last year, I have been working a lot in various Open Source Communities on GitHub in my free time and I have been enjoying these somehow relaxing contributions because they help me gain new knowledge on a daily basis.

After some time contributing I also got to know how kind and welcoming communities behind those projects are. These people have all one thing in common with you: They want to build great stuff in their leisure time. Especially the Astro community is the one and only I have enjoyed being in the most, since it's the most rewarding and friendly at the same time. Not all communities can achieve such a great status among OSS.

Recently, I discovered another evolving project founded by @pelikhan.bsky.social which aims to automatically translate all your documentation, blogs or shop sites whenever something changes with the help of AI. Whilst initially sceptical, reading more about the project in its README.md had me hooked.

The approach of strictly guiding AI into only translating little chunks - mostly sentences or paragraphs with perfectionist instructions - made me think that this could really work. So I tried it out in my own project, my blog. And to my surprise, those translations were much better than I expected. Of course you notice that it was translated by AI - handmade work will hopefully never be replaced entirely - but if you fairly mention that you use AI in an aside, this is much more accessibly for people than nothing.

So I took a closer look at the actual code of the project. After noticing some little inconsistencies, spaces for improvements and missing but very cool features here and there, I started contributing there as well. I mean, after one year of contributions in bigger project, PRs were nothing new to me.

You have to know that this was a Friday evening - almost night in my timezone - and Peli was currently online, also doing commits after commits to the project. I quickly noticed that, in contrast to the other projects I am part of, Peli did not waste any time merging PRs. It felt very rewarding this night because I just kept going until 1am, Peli merging faster than I could improve features, docs and fixes. Another aspect that felt great was that since this was a young project, Peli did not hesitate to just merge, try it out locally and then pushing little fixes I missed.

Fast-forward three days and I am now an official contributor to the project, making it greater and greater almost daily, mainly focusing on docs and the support for my heart project: Starlight.

Peli and I have our virtual productivity sessions between 4pm and 8pm UTC, extending longer on weekends. So if you want to join us as an early bird of the project or got interested in using it, feel free to check it out on GitHub.