internationalization

The first **internationalization / i18n** specialization in the library. It owns the full agentic localization pipeline — carrying a source codebase from hardcoded strings through per-locale translation to a policy-gated production release — with per-locale parallel fan-out and human approval on every action that commits spend or ships a locale to users. No i18n specialization existed anywhere in library/ before this one.

Flagship process: localization-lifecycle

localization-lifecycle.js (@process internationalization/localization-lifecycle) walks one source root through the whole lifecycle:

**Inputs:** { sourceRoot (required, default '.'), sourceLocale?='en-US', targetLocales (required non-empty BCP-47 tags — each must resolve in LOCALE_TIERS), vendor? {name, contactRef} (required when any target routes to a human-vendor tier), glossary? {terms:[{source,target?,doNotTranslate?,note?}]}, resourceDir?='artifacts/i18n/locales', maxFixAttempts?=2, kipEnabled?=true, kipDir?='.a5c/kip', kipModel?='sonnet', artifactsDir? }

**Outputs:** { success, extraction, locales, gatedActions, glossaryAdditions, kipFactsAsserted, artifacts, metadata } — success = extraction ok && at least one locale released && every released locale had approved===executed. Blocked locales are surfaced honestly in metadata.localesBlocked, never silently dropped.

LOCALE_TIERS routing table

A frozen (Object.freeze) routing table keyed by BCP-47 tag, styled on incident-lifecycle.js SEVERITY_ROUTING. tierRouteFor(locale) returns the frozen entry and **throws** on any locale absent from the table — there is **no default tier** (fallbacks forbidden). isRtl(locale) derives directionality from RTL_LOCALES (['ar','he','fa','ur']) and throws on an empty/invalid tag. Operators extend the table per product.

route is one of human-vendor | machine-plus-human-review | machine-only. vendorSpendGated:true means the locale's translation contributes to the translation-vendor-spend gate. LENGTH_EXPANSION_BUDGET (also frozen) supplies the per-locale length-expansion threshold used by the regression sweep (German expands most at 1.35; CJK contracts, e.g. ja-JP 0.6); it ships an explicit documented default entry.

Policy-gated actions

All approvals go through routedBreakpoint; for both policy-gated actions the breakpointId **equals** the actionId and tags are ['policy-gated','internationalization']. Fail-closed: the executor task runs **only** on approved===true — a rejection is honored, recorded, and never worked around (no machine-substitution fallback).

Additional (non-gated) breakpoint on the surface:

adversarialGate combinator per locale on fix-budget exhaustion (expert owner, combinator-fixed). The process does not re-declare it; an escalation reject blocks that locale.

• internationalization.translation-qa.<locale>.gate-escalation — raised internally by the

outputs.gatedActions records **every** decision — { actionId, required, approved, autoApproved, response, executed } — including auto-approvals (recorded raw from the BreakpointResult) and skipped conditional gates ({ required:false, approved:false, autoApproved:false, response:null, executed:false } — never omitted). publishLocale is keyed per-locale. metadata.breakpointsHit logs every raised breakpointId in order.

Quality bar

(glossary-conformance-critic, placeholder-integrity-critic, cultural-back-translation-critic) fanned out in parallel, all distinct from the localization-translator. Critics must RUN an executed back-translation diff and a programmatic source-vs-target placeholder diff; file-read citations alone do not satisfy the gate, and passed:true with an empty evidence array is a protocol failure enforced by the combinator.

render, an RTL mirror check (isRtl-driven), and a length-expansion measurement vs LENGTH_EXPANSION_BUDGET; evidence is minItems:1 and the orchestrator honors passed:true only with non-empty executed evidence.

maxFixAttempts rounds, then the combinator escalates to the owner.

directionality throws (isRtl), an empty targetLocales throws, a vendor-tier locale without inputs.vendor throws **before** the spend gate, and a gate-unapproved release is never executed via an alternate path. A locale that fails its QA gate (incl. escalation reject) or its regression sweep is BLOCKED and surfaced in metadata.localesBlocked.

• **adversarialGate translation-QA with executed evidence** — three independent critics
• **Executed regression sweep** — i18n.regression-sweep EXECUTES a pseudo-localization
• **Bounded fix loop** — the shared gateFixerTask edits the locale bundle for up to
• **No fallbacks** — an unknown locale tier throws (tierRouteFor), an unknown locale

kip integration

kipRecall at start (topic: glossary terms and prior locale issues for the source targets, kind i18n-glossary) and kipAssert at close — confirmed/added glossary terms (term:<source> --localizes-to--> <target> {locale}), per-locale QA outcome (locale:<tag> --qa-gate-outcome-->), regression outcome, and release decision — per shared/skills/kip-librarian. An empty store is a fresh brain, never an error; assert failures are reported by the librarian task, never swallowed.

Usage

babysitter run:create \
  --process library/specializations/internationalization/localization-lifecycle.js \
  --inputs '{
    "sourceRoot": ".",
    "sourceLocale": "en-US",
    "targetLocales": ["de-DE", "ja-JP", "ar-SA", "nl-NL"],
    "vendor": { "name": "Acme Localization", "contactRef": "vendor@acme-loc.example" },
    "glossary": {
      "terms": [
        { "source": "Dashboard", "target": "Übersicht", "note": "de-DE product term" },
        { "source": "Acme", "doNotTranslate": true }
      ]
    },
    "resourceDir": "artifacts/i18n/locales",
    "maxFixAttempts": 2
  }'

targetLocales above mixes tiers deliberately — de-DE/ja-JP/ar-SA are human-vendor (so the translation-vendor-spend gate fires and vendor is required), ar-SA is RTL (so the regression sweep runs a mirror check), and nl-NL is machine-only.

Files

i18n.* Style-A agent tasks + the frozen LOCALE_TIERS/RTL_LOCALES/ LENGTH_EXPANSION_BUDGET routing tables with throwing lookups + orchestration).

— routedBreakpoint, adversarialGate, gateFixerTask, kipRecall, kipAssert.

• `localization-lifecycle.js` — the flagship process (the
• Combinators: `../common-utilities/routed-gate-combinators.js`