Open Salamander

Comments Translation Progress

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 Michal Várady, 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 Elias Bachaalany 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: