Chinese Localization for Hermes Agent CLI

Background

Hermes Agent has a growing user base in China and other Chinese-speaking regions. Many users (including myself) would benefit from having the CLI interface localized to Chinese, especially for:

• Compression feedback messages
• Session token usage display
• Voice mode status
• Approval prompts and choices
• Timeout warnings
• MCP server reload messages

Proposed Solution

I've implemented a lightweight i18n solution in my fork: https://github.com/gzsiang/hermes-agent

Key Features

1. Configurable language switching via approvals.language in ~/.hermes/config.yaml:

   approvals:
     language: zh  # or 'en' for English

2. Zero breaking changes - defaults to English when no language is set

3. Minimal code changes:

   • Added tools/i18n.py (~250 lines) with format_zh() function
   • Wrapped user-facing strings in cli.py with format_zh() calls
   • No external dependencies (pure Python)

4. Easy to extend - translation dictionary can be expanded for more strings or additional languages

Example Usage

# Before
print("🗜️ Compressing {count} messages...")

# After
print(f"🗜️ {format_zh('Compressing {count} messages', count=count)}...")

Output with language: zh:

🗜️ 正在压缩 10 条消息...

Output with language: en (default):

🗜️ Compressing 10 messages...

Questions for the Maintainers

1. Is there an official i18n plan for Hermes Agent? If so, I'd love to align my implementation with it.

2. Would you be open to a PR for this lightweight i18n approach? I'm happy to:

   • Improve code style to match the project
   • Add unit tests
   • Expand translations based on feedback
   • Refactor if there's a preferred pattern

3. If not ready for i18n, I'll continue maintaining this in my fork for Chinese users. No pressure!

Notes

• Current implementation only covers high-frequency CLI strings (~20 locations)
• Translation quality could be improved with native speaker review
• The approach is designed to be non-intrusive and easy to remove if not adopted

Thanks for building such an amazing tool! 🙏