[GSoC 2026]: Continued Development of Translation Tracker

Topic

Hi everyone,
I'm Aashish, this year's GSoC Contributor, working on the continued development of the translation tracker. I wanted to share and potentially get feedback on what I'll be working on this summer.

I’ll be updating these items as the project progresses. Feedback is always welcome!

Description

This tracking issue outlines the goals, deliverables, and timeline for the Google Summer of Code 2026 project: Continued Development of Translation Tracker.

Building upon the robust foundation laid during GSoC 2025, this project aims to close operational gaps in our automated translation synchronization workflow. The core objective is to make tracking highly actionable for human translators, automate issue management, expand our content coverage, and provide clear progress visualization for language stewards and maintainers.

Core Goals & Deliverables

1. Improve Existing Issue Quality

• In-Issue Diffs: Update the tracker (index.js) to parse the englishDiff patch snippet and render it within a collapsible <details> section inside the GitHub Issue body. This allows volunteer translators to see exactly what changed without navigating away.
• Duplicate Detection: Leverage the GitHub REST API to search for open tracker issues matching the specific file path and language labels before creating a new tracking ticket, updating the existing issue with new diff info if found.

2. Stub-File Generation for New Pages

• Automated Placeholders: When a new English MDX page is created without a language counterpart, the GitHub Action will automatically generate a placeholder stub file in the respective language folders.
• Frontmatter & Tracking Flags: Stubs will pre-fill essential frontmatter (e.g., title, description) in English and append an explicit tracking flag (e.g., needsTranslation: true).
• Pull Request Workflow: Group these stub creations into a single automated PR per language. This avoids auto-merging and leaves full review control in the hands of repository maintainers.

3. Auto-Close Issues on Translation PR Merge

• Automated Cleanup: Build a dedicated GitHub Action workflow triggered on pull_request (closed + merged) events to prevent manual backlog noise.
• Path & Label Parsing: The workflow will parse changed translation file paths, identify target languages, search for corresponding open tracker issues (via labels like lang-es, needs translation), and programmatically close them. It will natively support standard "Resolves #" conventions.

4. Translation Progress Visualization

• Status Dashboard: Implement a scheduled GitHub Action that scans language directories and generates a translation-status.json containing coverage percentages, breakdowns, and last-checked timestamps.
• Markdown Progress Bars: Render this data dynamically into a public-facing MDX file (translation-status.mdx) utilizing clean markdown progress visuals to show overall coverage per language.

5. Expanded Content Coverage & Contributor Documentation

• Directory Verification: Validate and consistently extend the tracker's scanning, issue creation, and dashboard capabilities across all active translatable directories (including tutorials/ and examples/).
• New Contributor Onboarding Guide: Create an accessible documentation guide for new open-source contributors showing them exactly how to find a tracked issue, start translating files, and submit their first localization pull request.

What do you think overall goals? I would love your feedback.

• Contributor: @aashishpanthi
• Mentor: @Divyansh013

Start with the existing tracker in index.js and the GitHub Action workflows described in the issue. Review how translation directories, labels, and changed paths are currently handled before checking the planned translation-status.json and translation-status.mdx outputs. Done means the listed synchronization, dashboard, directory coverage, and contributor-documentation goals are implemented and verified.