dsh-zh-tw-ui

dsh-zh-tw-ui

繁體中文 | English

Renders the entire DeepSeek Harness (DSH) Web UI in Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) — DSH's own copy, third-party plugin copy, and text that later DSH versions add — by converting the DOM, not by shipping a language pack.

Settings -> General -> Language: 中文 (Simplified)   <- the app's own locale
What you actually see:           繁體中文（台灣）     <- converted on screen

Because it works at the render layer, it does not have the failure mode that dictionary-based language packs have: uncovered copy falls back to Simplified Chinese and the UI looks half-translated.

---

The problem

DSH ships exactly two locales: zh (Simplified) and en. Using DSH in Taiwan breaks in three places at once:

1. DSH's own UI is Simplified without a language pack;
2. third-party plugins (market, sidebar, IM bridges, Agent Teams, …) each ship their own Simplified dictionaries, which no language pack can reach;
3. every DSH release adds copy, so a language pack's dictionary is always one version behind.

This plugin attacks the shared root cause: whatever produced the text, it is converted on screen.

Goals / non-goals

Goals

Non-goals

• Not a language pack: no new entry in DSH's Language list, no change to DSH's locale setting.
• No translation beyond Simplified → Traditional: English is left alone, no model calls.
• Does not change stored data — see Limitations.
• Web/desktop clients only: no DOM in TUI or headless profiles.
• Does not convert text painted into a canvas, or cross-origin iframes.

---

Why not just use another Traditional Chinese plugin?

This is the reason the project exists, so here is the honest version. All figures were checked on 2026-10-13 from each package's npm manifest or repo README.

Each existing approach has a structural weakness:

1. Dictionary-based (better-locale, iceice666) — coverage is frozen at the upstream version the pack was built against. Measured on this machine: better-locale 0.4.3 ships 39 namespaces while DSH 0.2.0-rc.2 registers about 49 core namespaces, and 17 of them have no Traditional dictionary at all (pluginManager, permission, settings.shell, settings.webSearch, agent-team, voice-input, schedule.manager, …). Worse, its fallback chain is zh-TW → zh → en, so the gaps render in Simplified, not English — which is exactly why a language pack can look like "it installed but nothing happened".
2. Core-patching (the npm dsh-locale-zh-tw) — tightly coupled to DSH internals and designed to degrade silently: after a DSH update it can simply stop doing anything, without an error.
3. Declared peer ranges — when your DSH version falls outside them, DSH skips the whole bundle at boot, silently (the on-disk compatibility.json exemption list is the fingerprint of working around that).

This project's trade-off: touch no DSH API, work only on the DOM. The price is that it is a display-layer conversion; what you get is version independence, coverage of third-party plugins, and failures you can actually see. The full consequences are listed under Limitations.

Note: dsh-multi-lang-ui overlaps this project functionally and is a valid alternative. This project deliberately stays smaller and single-purpose: DOM conversion only — one job, no dictionary to keep in sync, no @deepseek-ai/* dependency of any kind.

---

How it works

                ┌─ DSH's own copy (Simplified)
screen text ────┼─ third-party plugin copy (their own Simplified)
                └─ content that appears later (streaming, dynamic panels)
                        │
                        ▼
        DOM text node → OpenCC cn→twp (Taiwan wording) → override table → write back
                        ▲
                        └─ MutationObserver: re-run on added nodes / changed text

• Engine: OpenCC cn → twp (Simplified → Traditional with Taiwan vocabulary): 设置→設定, 网络→網路, 软件→軟體, 文件夹→資料夾, 服务器→伺服器, 内存→記憶體, 屏幕→螢幕, 鼠标→滑鼠, 保存→儲存, 搜索→搜尋, 插件→外掛.
• A small override table (DEFAULT_OVERRIDES in src/convert.mjs) fixes wording OpenCC misses or renders in a non-Taiwan way: 只讀→唯讀, 超時→逾時, 反饋→回饋, 獲取→取得, 許可權→權限.
• <html lang> is set to zh-Hant-TW so the browser picks Taiwan glyph forms.
• Memoised per text node, non-Han strings short-circuit, and values are only written when they actually change — the converter also remembers its own writes, so it can never ping-pong with React.

Safety boundary: what is never converted

In other words: code is never rewritten, and copying code behaves exactly as before.

---

Install

A. From this repo (the supported path today)

git clone https://github.com/linmino/dsh-zh-tw-ui.git
cd dsh-zh-tw-ui
node install.mjs --profile desktop      # 'desktop' is the default; use --profile web for the web profile

install.mjs does exactly four things, all reversible:

1. backs the profile's package.json and cordis.patch.yml up as *.zh-tw-ui.bak;
2. appends dsh-zh-tw-ui to dsh.profile.bundles;
3. sets the locale row's preference to zh (Simplified underneath, Traditional on screen — this keeps the UI Chinese even if you later remove another language pack, instead of falling back to English with nothing to convert);
4. links <profile>/node_modules/dsh-zh-tw-ui → this directory.

It runs no package manager, so nothing else in your profile is re-resolved.

Then restart DeepSeek Harness — a new bundle is composed only at boot; refreshing the page is not enough.

B. From npm (not published yet)

The name dsh-zh-tw-ui is currently free on npm. Once published:

dsh plugin --profile desktop add dsh-zh-tw-ui

Uninstall

node uninstall.mjs --profile desktop

Removes the link, drops the bundle entry and restores both backups. Your plugin sources are never deleted. Restart DSH afterwards.

---

Using it

The plugin has no UI and needs no configuration. To tune it, use the DevTools console of the main window:

__dshZhTw.status()          // { version, enabled, textNodes, attributes, skippedSubtrees, passes }
__dshZhTw.off()             // stop converting (text already converted stays)
__dshZhTw.on()              // resume
__dshZhTw.toggle()
__dshZhTw.refresh()         // full re-scan
__dshZhTw.convert('设置')    // test one string -> '設定'

The switch is persisted in localStorage['dsh-zh-tw-ui:enabled'].

Change wording: edit DEFAULT_OVERRIDES in src/convert.mjs (a list of [simplified, traditional] pairs), run node build.mjs, reload the page.

Exclude a region: add data-zh-tw-skip to the element (handy for side-by-side references or screenshots).

---

Limitations

An honest list. All of these follow from the display-layer design:

1. The screen changes; the data does not. Stored text, what the model receives, and what is written to files stay as they were.
   • Copying code: unaffected (code blocks are excluded).
   • Copying prose: you get Traditional, because the copy comes from the screen.
   • Your own message bubble renders in Traditional, but the model still receives exactly what you typed.
2. Text painted into a canvas is not converted (charts, image editors, self-drawn components).
3. Cross-origin iframe content is not converted (same-origin iframes are).
4. Wording can be contextually wrong. OpenCC is a phrase table; occasional mismatches happen (proper nouns especially). Tune the override table or mark the region with data-zh-tw-skip.
5. There is a performance cost. Every text node costs a dictionary lookup. Memoisation, the non-Han short circuit, and only touching added/changed nodes keep it small, but very long conversations or huge list pages may show a slight delay.
6. It is not a language pack. No "繁體中文" entry appears in DSH's Language list. If you switch DSH to English there is no Chinese on screen to convert, so the effect is "nothing happened".
7. Web/desktop clients only — TUI and headless have no DOM.
8. A linked install can be pruned. If installing another plugin from the market later triggers pnpm to re-resolve node_modules, the link may disappear (the plugin stops working; DSH itself is unaffected). Re-run node install.mjs.
9. Native chrome is out of scope: DSH Desktop's native menus, tray, and other non-web UI.

Tests

npm install
npm test

14 tests covering:

• conversion quality (core vocabulary, Taiwan override table), non-Han passthrough, stability under a second pass;
• skip rules: code/pre/textarea/input/contenteditable/CodeMirror/Monaco/ svg/data-zh-tw-skip/translate="no", and form controls converting only their placeholder;
• attribute conversion (title/placeholder/aria-label/alt);
• live mutations, streaming updates, and settling without further writes (no ping-pong with React);
• off() stops, on() catches up on what it missed;
• end to end: the generated lib/client.js loaded through DSH's real window.__ModuleLoader__.load(...) protocol, applied to a DOM, including the runtime switch and persistence;
• apply() never throws when there is no DOM (it can never break the client).

Repository layout

build.mjs                generates lib/client.js from src/ (with a syntax check)
install.mjs              installs into a profile (backup, bundles, locale, link)
uninstall.mjs            reverts
lib/index.js             host half: a no-op
lib/client.js            the generated browser bundle (the only file DSH loads)
src/apply.mjs            cordis client plugin body (switch, runtime API)
src/convert.mjs          conversion engine + Taiwan override table
src/dom-convert.mjs      DOM walk, skip rules, MutationObserver
src/vendor/              vendored opencc-js (byte-identical, licenses included)
cordis.patch.yml         inserts the plugin row into DSH's patch layer
test/run.mjs             the test suite

License

MIT for this project (see LICENSE). It embeds opencc-js (MIT) and the OpenCC dictionaries (Apache-2.0) — see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md for the file hashes and full license texts.

Credits

• opencc-js — OpenCC in the browser
• OpenCC — the Simplified/Traditional and Taiwan-vocabulary dictionaries
• And everyone who, tired of a Simplified interface, wrote a plugin