horacelubfa/en-zh-translation-polish

This is a plugin for AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI that translates English text into natural, idiomatic Chinese. Rather than producing a word-for-word rendering, the skill works through a seven-stage pipeline designed to avoid a common problem in English-to-Chinese translation: when English sentence structure carries over into the Chinese output, the result sounds stiff and unnatural to a native reader. The workflow starts by classifying the source text as hard or soft (legal, technical, and contracts are treated with more precision, essays and commentary get more room to breathe in Chinese), then strips away the English grammatical frame, drafts a translation that prioritizes Chinese idiom over structural mirroring, runs a diagnosis against a list of known translationese symptoms, polishes the rhythm with natural Chinese phrasing patterns, checks accuracy, and normalizes Chinese punctuation automatically. The default output is a side-by-side document with each English paragraph as a block quote followed immediately by the Chinese translation. Three reference files support the pipeline. One covers text classification and accuracy checks. A second lists nine categories of translationese symptoms and how to fix them, along with notes on where Westernized phrasing is acceptable. A third covers fourteen specific translation techniques such as breaking long sentences, shifting passive constructions to active voice, and restructuring relative clauses. To install the skill, run one command: npx skills add -g HoraceLuBFA/en-zh-translation-polish. After that it lives in ~/.agents/skills/ and can be invoked by describing the task in natural language or by calling it directly with a file path. By default the output includes both languages side by side. If you only want the Chinese version, you need to say so explicitly in the prompt. The project draws its methodology from a well-known Chinese translation textbook by Ye Zinan and is MIT licensed.