git-translate-commits

Translate git commit messages to a target language. Runs 100% offline by default using Argos Translate -- no API key, no cost. Optionally use LLM APIs for higher-quality contextual translation.

Why?

With LLM-powered coding assistants generating commits in mixed languages, repositories end up with inconsistent commit histories. This tool normalizes all commit messages to your preferred language in a single command.

Installation

The recommended way to install CLI tools is with pipx (isolated environment) or uv:

# Recommended: pipx (isolated install)
pipx install git-translate-commits

# Or: uv
uv tool install git-translate-commits

# Or: plain pip
pip install git-translate-commits

For LLM-based translation (optional):

pipx install "git-translate-commits[llm]"
# or: pip install "git-translate-commits[llm]"

For best rewrite performance, also install git-filter-repo:

pip install git-filter-repo

Quick Start

# Preview changes (offline, no API key needed)
git-translate-commits --lang en --dry-run

# Translate all commits on current branch to English (offline)
git-translate-commits --lang en

# Translate all branches to Brazilian Portuguese
git-translate-commits --lang pt-BR --all-branches

# Use LLM for higher quality (requires API key)
export OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-..."
git-translate-commits --lang en --engine llm

Translation Engines

Local (default) -- --engine local

Uses Argos Translate, an offline neural machine translation engine based on OpenNMT. Language packs (~50MB each) are downloaded automatically on first use.

• No API key required
• No cost
• Fully offline after first download
• Good quality for common language pairs

LLM -- --engine llm

Uses LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, or any OpenAI-compatible provider) for contextual translation via litellm. Requires pip install "git-translate-commits[llm]".

• Higher quality contextual translations
• Batch processing to minimize API calls and cost
• A 1,000-commit repo costs ~$0.05 with gpt-4o-mini

Usage

git-translate-commits [OPTIONS]

Required

Engine

Filtering

LLM Configuration (only with --engine llm)

Behavior

Environment Variables

# Engine and language
export GIT_TRANSLATE_ENGINE="local"   # or "llm"
export GIT_TRANSLATE_LANG="en"

# LLM-only settings
export OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-..."
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="sk-ant-..."
export GIT_TRANSLATE_PROVIDER="openai"
export GIT_TRANSLATE_MODEL="gpt-4o-mini"

Examples

# Offline translation (default) — no API key needed
git-translate-commits --lang en

# Translate commits by a specific author
git-translate-commits --lang en --author "dev@example.com"

# Translate commits from the last year
git-translate-commits --lang en --since "2025-01-01"

# Use LLM engine for better contextual quality
git-translate-commits --lang en --engine llm

# Use Anthropic Claude via LLM engine
git-translate-commits --lang en --engine llm --provider anthropic --model claude-sonnet-4-20250514

# Use a local OpenAI-compatible server (e.g. Ollama) via LLM engine
git-translate-commits --lang en --engine llm \
  --provider openai-compatible \
  --api-base-url http://localhost:11434/v1 \
  --model llama3

# Skip confirmation and backup
git-translate-commits --lang en --force --no-backup

What Gets Preserved

• File contents — no code is touched
• Author/committer — name, email, timestamps
• Conventional Commit prefixes — feat:, fix:, chore:, etc.
• Issue references — #123, JIRA-456
• Git trailers — Co-authored-by, Signed-off-by, etc.

⚠️ Important Notes

• Commit hashes will change. This is unavoidable since the message is part of the SHA hash. Coordinate with your team before force-pushing.
• A backup branch is created automatically before any changes (disable with --no-backup).
• A log file (.git-translate-log.json) is written with the full mapping of changes.
• Local engine is free. LLM engine costs ~$0.05 per 1,000 commits with gpt-4o-mini.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read the Contributing Guide for details on how to get started.

• Report a Bug
• Request a Feature

Development

git clone https://github.com/paladini/git-translate-commits.git
cd git-translate-commits
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

See CONTRIBUTING.md for full development guidelines.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 -- see the LICENSE file for details.

Author

Created and maintained by Fernando Paladini.