// the find
afc163/fanyi
A 🇨🇳 and 🇺🇸 translator in your command line
Fanyi is a CLI translator for Chinese-English translation, pulling results from iciba, Youdao, and an LLM simultaneously. It's aimed at developers who work across Chinese and English and want a fast terminal lookup without switching to a browser. The v11 release adds a built-in free LLM proxy so it works out of the box without any API key.
The three-source approach (iciba + Youdao + LLM) is genuinely useful — dictionary sources give you pronunciation and word-class breakdowns while the LLM handles sentences and idiomatic phrases that dictionaries choke on. The built-in free proxy for LLM access is a solid UX decision: zero-config install that actually works removes the biggest barrier to adoption. The Agent Skill integration for Claude Code is a nice touch — it means you can stay in your terminal workflow and have translation happen automatically during coding sessions. The codebase is small, well-tested, and actively maintained with CI and Codecov.
The free proxy is an unspecified backend you're trusting with every query — the README says nothing about what it is, where it runs, or how long it'll stay free, which is a problem if you're translating anything sensitive. Language support is hard-wired to Chinese↔English only; the name and framing imply general-purpose translation but it'll silently give you nothing useful for any other language pair. The search history feature stores queries locally in plaintext with no mention of what data format or location, making it awkward to manage across machines. Upstream API dependency on iciba and Youdao means any scraping-style integration can break without warning — there's no mention of fallback behavior when those sources fail.