chinese2english

Renders Chinese UI text in DeepSeek Harness third-party plugins as English.

Most community plugins ship hardcoded Chinese, and the interface language setting does not reach it. This plugin rewrites that text server-side, before any of it reaches the browser.

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How it works

The text arrives by two routes, so there are two seams.

Plugin bundles. clientModules serves every plugin bundle over /plugins/.... Wrapping clientModules.bundleResource decodes each JavaScript response, rewrites the Chinese string literals it can translate, and returns the result. One interception covers every plugin, including combination bundles that carry dozens, and it runs before any plugin code is evaluated.

API copy. Plugin descriptors, model and provider names, and settings descriptions never appear in bundles at all: they reach the browser as JSON over /api. The gateway resolves its own dispatchRpc per request, so overriding that instance method intercepts those responses without claiming the interceptor slot the gateway already owns.

Three deliberate choices:

• All-or-nothing literals. Chinese has no word boundaries, so replacing known words wherever they appear corrupts larger words (当前工作区 would become Saat IniWorkspace). A literal is translated only when every Chinese character in it is covered by a dictionary entry; anything else is left in Chinese, since half-translated text reads worse than untranslated text.
• A compile gate. Each rewritten bundle is parsed with new Function before it is served. If a rewrite ever produced invalid JavaScript, the original bytes are served instead, so a bad dictionary entry cannot break the UI.
• An endpoint allowlist. Only endpoints returning server-authored copy are rewritten. /api/session/list, for example, returns your own prompts and transcripts, and is left untouched.

Where an author already wrote English, that English is used rather than the dictionary: locale maps ({ zh, en }) resolve to the English sibling, and bilingual descriptors joined by · keep their English half.

The client half does one thing: it selects the en locale through ctx.locale.setLocale, which persists the preference. It never touches the DOM.

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What it does not cover

• Text rendered inside an <img>, canvas, or other non-text payload.
• Content fetched from a third-party server at runtime (announcements, remote catalogs) rather than from DSH itself.
• Chinese inside regular expressions that match Chinese input. /失败|错误|无法/ classifies a status message and /^[一-龥]{2}$/ validates a two-character name; translating those would change plugin behaviour instead of removing text. This is 111 characters across four bundles, all of it code rather than copy.

Everything the interface renders is translated. Measured through the runtime path over the bundles a live instance served: Chinese in string literals 50,399 → 0, and Chinese anywhere in the served bytes 55,345 → 111.

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Installation

dsh plugin --profile web add chinese2english

Remove it with dsh plugin --profile web remove chinese2english.

Restart DSH after installing, so the plugin is loaded and its transport wrapper is installed before the first bundle request.

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Development

npm run dict    # rebuild the dictionaries from their sources
npm run build   # bundle the server and client halves into lib/

Dictionary sources, merged in this order (later wins):

1. dshmarket_dict.json — harvested pairs.
2. UI_TRANSLATIONS in patch-plugins.py — harvested pairs.
3. src/dictionary.extra.json — curated entries.
4. src/dictionary.mt.json — machine translations of harvested literals.
5. src/dictionary.residual.json — literals measured as still untranslated.
6. locale-pairs.json — author-written { zh, en } pairs lifted from plugin locale maps; highest quality, so it overrides everything above.

Comments are a separate dictionary, src/dictionary.comments.json, built by scripts/merge-comments.mjs. A comment is replaced only on an exact whole-comment match, which keeps the box-drawing runs and * alignment that give those notes their structure intact.

Add or fix translations in src/dictionary.extra.json, then run npm run dict && npm run build.

Measuring coverage

Progress was over-reported twice, both times by measuring the wrong thing, so measurement is scripted rather than done by eye:

node scripts/served.mjs /tmp/boot.html served.json   # resolve served bundles
npm run measure served.json                          # count Chinese left

Save the boot HTML from a running instance first (/?token=…), because the served set is what reaches the browser. Two traps these scripts close:

• Scan the served set, not a plugin root. 55 of the 58 bundles live in the dsh install tree. A scan of the profile tree alone reports nearly everything translated while whole screens stay Chinese.
• Decode before counting. Bundlers emit non-ASCII as \uXXXX, so a bundle can be entirely Chinese while containing no CJK character at all.

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License

MIT © oiupoyt