Update on Comments Translation Project (5/2026): DONE

[janrysavy]

Just for your information, we're still here and alive. We've managed to secure three interns, all of them very strong in English, to revive the translation of comments from Czech to English. The work will slowly start this month, but the main part will begin in September. Once we complete the translation (I believe this time we'll manage to finish it within a few months), we'll return to the question of Unicode support. Until then, the translation will keep us busy.

[janrysavy]

Originally, almost the entire Salamander codebase was commented in Czech (with just a few exceptions in some plugins), since open-sourcing the project was never planned. Once the source code was released publicly, we decided to translate all Czech comments into English.

The first phase of the translation took place in December 2023, thanks to the enthusiasm of @majklvi , who manually translated the code with the help of ChatGPT, Google Translator and DeepL.

Another major portion of the machine translation work was done by @0xeb in April 2024. He helped shape the idea of the final translation workflow — combining automated translation aware of the surrounding C++ code, manual review of critical parts, and a final automated check to ensure that no unintended changes were made to the actual C++ code during translation.

For the following stages, we use OpenAI Codex to perform the initial machine translation, followed by manual review by hired interns. Because this is an enormous amount of work, manual checking is currently limited to the core of Salamander; plugin source code will rely solely on the automated OpenAI Codex translation.

You can track the number of translated comments over time:

2023-12-11 Commit a28afcb9

2023-12-19 Commit d39c366d

2025-10-03 Commit 7bca811a

[janrysavy]

2025-10-06 Commit 85831d72

[ags1234]

In a short while almost all the project will be translated.
The pictures above are very clear and informative. How were they generated?

[janrysavy]

https://github.com/OpenSalamander/salamander/blob/main/tools/README.md

uv run comment-translation-status --project-root ..\src

[WaldemarH]

@janrysavy

It looks good.. we are now at 91.4%. :) ... any feeling how much longer will it take? .. not presurring anything just curiosity. :)

[0xeb]

@janrysavy I have finished all the translations in my fork https://github.com/0xeb/salamander .

I have started Long Path support, Unicode and a lot of bug fixes.

I am at least 600+ commits ahead.

It would be nice if you kind of pin my repo and join forces with me? I am moving fast and I don't like waiting weeks for slow PRs and development.

[WaldemarH]

@0xeb as I've said at the beginning I didn't like the idea that only one or two people are owners of the repository as you never know what will happen and it will just lock down the repo.

For me this translation is going to slow to, but it is what it is.
I feel your frustration too and I've stopped working on OS too, but one thing I've learned is that it's much more important to be a team player then a soloist and having a group plan is important.
One thing that can happen is that if the changes you made will not be acepted then we've just lost lots of work which could be put into OS.

Well we'll see what Jan will say. I hope the translations will soon end and we can start working on OS and create a list of what to do in an organized manner.

[0xeb]

@WaldemarH a lot has changed since your last message. Time to check again: https://github.com/0xeb/sally

[WaldemarH]

Hi Elias,

thanks for the notice, but I'm staying away from all the AI generated stuff.. have seen to much shit generated by it.

Now I have no clue, if Jan will allow AI code in it or not, but at least on my fork there will be non.
But that is the beauty of the open source as anybody can make his/her own version.

I'm even thinking of moving away from github to codeberg as I'm reaaaaly fed up with all the M$ crap that is happening.
So I'm just waiting for Jan to finish the translation, that I can update the fork and then we'll see into which direction Jan will steer the ship.

I was also thinking to clean up the code so that OS will run under Wine (haven't tested it yet if it does) and maybe even switch to Linux in time (not happy about it as it has its own issues).. for now W10 will stay on my machine until things will brake.

Anyway thanks for the ping and have a super good time. :)

Br
Waldemar

[WaldemarH]

@janrysavy Hi Jan. I've seen that the comments are all green now and that there were no merges for last 3 weeks. Just curious if you have finished with the translation step?

[janrysavy]

Hi Waldemar, It is nearly finished. There are some comments that could be polished, but the Czech original wasn’t 100% either, so it is acceptable. We still need to translate the remaining Czech terms in the code, such as the TRACE_* macros, etc. I will be able to return to it in June and would like to finish it then.

[janrysavy]

DONE