diff --git a/AGENTS.md b/AGENTS.md
index 9925af8..ae8a642 100644
--- a/AGENTS.md
+++ b/AGENTS.md
@@ -62,7 +62,8 @@ internal/layout         line wrapping + pagination (paper sizes, locked pages);
 internal/pdf            hand-written PDF 1.4 writer, standard Courier fonts, zero dependencies
 internal/spell          Hunspell .aff/.dic reader, checker (compounds too), suggestions, word scan
 internal/marian         MarianMT (OPUS-MT) inference in pure Go: safetensors, SentencePiece unigram,
-                        transformer encoder-decoder, beam search, verified download
+                        transformer encoder-decoder, beam search, verified download. In-tree on
+                        purpose (one binary, no cgo, offline by design): see the package doc.
 internal/translate      French → English script translation: language detection, screenplay term
                         tables, per-element rules, name protection, parallel sentence translation
 frontend/index.html     app shell: header bar, navigator, paper, HUD, <dialog>s
diff --git a/internal/marian/model.go b/internal/marian/model.go
index 07e6fd3..86057de 100644
--- a/internal/marian/model.go
+++ b/internal/marian/model.go
@@ -3,6 +3,18 @@
 // plain Go: a SentencePiece tokenizer, the transformer encoder-decoder and
 // beam search. A model directory holds config.json, model.safetensors,
 // source.spm, target.spm and vocab.json.
+//
+// The engine lives in-tree on purpose. Plotzilla ships as one binary built
+// with only the Go toolchain: a native runtime (ctranslate2, argos) would
+// add cgo and per-distribution packaging, and a separate binary or plugin
+// an install step, all for a single menu item. Translation is offline by
+// design — an unpublished script never leaves the machine — and the model
+// is data downloaded at runtime (Apache-2.0), so neither the "no
+// third-party dependency" rule nor the GPL is affected. The screenplay
+// conventions stay out of this package (internal/translate owns them) and
+// the pipeline is covered by a synthetic tiny model and, on demand, the
+// real one. If more language pairs are ever added, each with its own
+// 300 MB download and quirks, reconsider a separate optional component.
 package marian
 
 import (