Automate Bilingual Blog Publishing with GitHub Actions and Gemini AI

While reviewing Google Analytics, I noticed that my blog receives a good amount of traffic from English-speaking visitors, with Chinese being the second most common language.

Because I usually write posts in Chinese and only occasionally in English, manually translating each article is tedious.

To solve this, I automated the bilingual publishing process using AI and CI/CD.

My Solution

Use GitHub Actions + Gemini API to automatically generate English versions of my blog posts.

The overall workflow is simple:

When I push a new post to the repository, GitHub Actions is triggered.

The workflow calls the Gemini API to translate the Chinese content into English.

The translated article is committed to a new branch and a pull request is opened automatically.

Netlify builds a preview; after I review it on GitHub, I can merge the PR with one click.

Once merged, the English version is published.

Core Configuration

Below is a trimmed version of the GitHub Actions workflow:

on:
  push:
    paths:
      - 'content/posts/**/*.md'
      - 'content/misc/**/*.md'
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 2 * * *' # prevent missed translations and control API rate
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  check-and-translate:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v5
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v5
        with:
          python-version: '3.13'
      - run: make install-deps
      - run: make translate
        env:
          GEMINI_API_KEY: ${{secrets.GEMINI_API_KEY}}
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}

The dependency installation and translation logic are defined in the Makefile:

install-deps:
  pip3 install -r requirements.txt

translate:
  python3 .github/auto_translate.py

Full source code is available at https://github.com/shenxianpeng/blog .

Results and Takeaways

The automation delivers three main benefits:

Convenient : No manual copy‑paste translation.

Efficient : English versions appear almost instantly after the Chinese post is written.

Cost‑free : Using Gemini API and Netlify incurs no extra expense.

More importantly, many seemingly tedious tasks can be solved with AI + automation. The same approach can be extended to bilingual documentation, internationalized knowledge bases, or internal wiki translation.

Final Thought

Don’t waste time on repetitive work—let tools and automation handle it so you can focus on creativity.

If you maintain a blog or documentation, I hope this article inspires you.