Gemini Headless Mode Translation Guide

Objective: To perform non-interactive bulk translation locally using Gemini CLI (gemini-2.5-flash), avoiding tool calls and permission pop-ups, suitable for quick machine translation drafts of prompts/skills/documents.

Principle Overview

CLI connects directly to Gemini API using locally cached Google credentials; model inference is done in the cloud.
Use --allowed-tools '' to disable tool calls, ensuring only plain text is returned, without triggering shell/browser actions.
Pass text to be translated via standard input, and get results from standard output, facilitating script pipeline processing.
A proxy (http/https) can be set to route requests through a local proxy node, improving success rate and stability.

Basic Commands

# Proxy (if needed)
export http_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:9910
export https_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:9910

# Single example: Chinese -> English
printf '你好，翻译成英文。' | gemini -m gemini-2.5-flash \
  --output-format text \
  --allowed-tools '' \
  "Translate this to English."

The prompt can be placed as a positional argument (-p/--prompt is deprecated).
Output is plain text, can be redirected for saving.

Batch File Translation Example (stdin → stdout)

src=i18n/zh/prompts/README.md
dst=i18n/en/prompts/README.md
cat "$src" | gemini -m gemini-2.5-flash --output-format text --allowed-tools '' \
  "Translate to English; keep code fences unchanged." > "$dst"

Can loop through multiple files in a script; check exit code and output on failure.

Integration with existing l10n-tool

l10n-tool (deep-translator) is used for full machine translation; if quality or connectivity is unstable, it can be switched to file-by-file processing with Gemini CLI.
Process: cat source_file | gemini ... > target_file; if necessary, place redirection instructions or manually proofread in other language directories.

Notes

Ensure gemini command is in PATH and identity authentication is complete (first run will guide login).
For long texts, it is recommended to split them into segments to avoid timeouts; code blocks can be kept as is by declaring "keep code fences unchanged" in the prompt.
Adjust proxy port according to actual environment; if no proxy is needed, omit relevant environment variables.

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