opencode-translate

Use opencode in your native language. LLM always hears English.

Demo

Why

LLMs are worse in non-English. Benchmarks confirm it on every frontier model.

• Claude Opus 4.7 / GPT-5.5 / Gemini 3.1 Pro: identical coding tasks scored 5/5 in English but dropped to 0–1/5 in Arabic and Korean (LILT, 2025).
• Anthropic's own numbers: Japanese 96.9%, Korean 96.6%, Yoruba 80.3% — English is always the baseline (Anthropic docs).
• Token tax: Korean ~1.25×, Japanese ~1.25×, Arabic ~3× more tokens per equivalent content. Higher cost, smaller effective context.

This plugin lets you write in your language while the model works in English — best of both worlds.

Full research write-up: docs/why.en.md

Install

bun add -g opencode-translate

Setup

Add to ~/.config/opencode/opencode.jsonc:

{
  "plugin": [
    ["opencode-translate", {
      "model": "openai/gpt-5.4-mini", // model to use for translation
      "variant": "minimal",            // optional model variant / thinking effort
      "lang": "Korean"                // language you speak
    }]
  ]
}

Usage

Prefix any message with $en to activate translation for that session.

$en 프로젝트 루트의 package.json을 읽고 요약해줘

All subsequent messages in the same session are translated automatically — no need to repeat $en.

Options

| Option | Type | Default | Description | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | model | string | required | Translator model in provider/model-id form | | variant | string | optional | Translator model variant / thinking effort (for example, "minimal", "high", or "max") | | lang | string | required | Language you speak (e.g. "Korean", "Japanese") | | trigger | string[] | ["$en"] | Keywords that activate translation | | verbose | boolean | false | Print translation logs |