Keeping Translations Up-to-date

Every Friday at 6:00 PM PST, gatsbybot will run a sync script on every translation repo to bring them up-to-date with the current English repo. If there is an update to a page that is already translated, gatsbybot will create a pull request listing the conflicts between the translation and the new English content. Resolving these conflicts and merging these pull requests is essential to keeping your translation repo up-to-date.

Gatsbybot sync behavior

If there are existing sync pull requests marked by the sync label, gatsbybot will skip the repository until the next time it runs. Because of this, it is important to make sure that you merge sync and conflict pull requests promptly, so that stale translations don’t build up.

Resolving sync pull requests

When it runs the sync script, gatsbybot will create up to two pull requests. One is named:

This pull request contains updates to all files that do not have conflicts. This includes files that have not been translated yet, and files that have been added to Gatsby. In general, these files can be merged in as-is, but it may be worth looking over them to see if there are any new files that were added to the repo that need to be translated.

🚨NOTE: Make sure you do NOT choose the “Squash and merge” option when merging this pull request. Squashing will result in Git losing information about the sync, and will lead to extra conflicts on your next sync. Always make sure that you use the “Merge pull request” option.

The second pull request will be named:

This pull request will list files that have conflicts between translated content and English content. These updates will appear as Git conflicts:

Here, the top block is the original translated line and the bottom block is the updated source content. You should resolve these conflicts by updating the top block to reflect the content of the bottom block.

You may use whatever tools you like to resolve these conflicts: the GitHub UI, the command line, or a code editor like VS Code. See the Common types of merge issues section for how to resolve various conflicts.

Manually syncing translation repos

If for whatever reason you’d like to manually sync your translation repo, you can do so by running these commands:

Fix all merge conflicts and create a pull request to finish the merge.

Common types of merge issues

Frontmatter changes

This type of conflict reflects a change to the frontmatter of a document.

Removing a field:

Adding a field:

Changing a field:

Typos fixes

Sometimes there is a typo or grammatical error in the English source that gets fixed in an update.

Since these typos most likely don’t exist in the translated version, you can most likely use the translated version as-is.

Formatting changes

Sometimes the only difference is a change in formatting, such as adding back-ticks to annotate something as code, or changing the level of headings:

The only necessary change is to ensure the translated content carries over these formatting updates.

Link updates

These changes involve updating the URL of a link:

Resolve these changes by updating the link.

Content changes

Sometimes, the content of the source page is actually updated and needs a translation. Make sure to read the change carefully and change the translation to match its meaning.

Conflicts in untranslated files

Sometimes, you may find conflicts in files that haven’t been translated yet:

This is usually because of a previous improper merge (for example, using the “Squash and merge” option). In this case, it’s usually alright to accept the new content. In VS Code, this is done using the “Accept Incoming Change” option:

Creating a separate pull request

If a page has significant changes, it may be worth splitting it into its own pull request:

Once the branch is pushed, create a pull request for branch sync-tutorial-0 with conflicts-9032a0 as the base branch.