Are there some Japanese exclusive games from days gone by that you always wish you could've played? Did your favourite obscure franchise get a game release in Japan but never saw localization or a fan made translation hack? Well it's your lucky day.

Interpreter is a new project that can live-translate Japanese text in retro games, all offline and without a required internet connection.

The application is optimized for retro games that use traditional pixel-based fonts and uses MeikiOCR. The tool offers two overlay modes - a simple banner overlay as seen above or by replacing text directly over the original Japanese text at OCR-detected positions.

Windows, macOS and Linux installers are available, and after the initial model is downloaded, everything runs offline for privacy and speed.

GitHub source

 

[JaNDeRPeiCH]

Dang it

Welp no support for xlibre. Thanks for making the tool that doesnt support xlibre.Anyways a great project but i will not install in my arch linux OS.

 

[whitesword7]

I’m tempted to use this for yakuza kenzan… has anyone tried it using RPCS3?

 

[Minox]

Welp no support for xlibre. Thanks for making the tool that doesnt support xlibre.Anyways a great project but i will not install in my arch linux OS.

Checking the sources X11 appears to be supported so seems likely that xlibre is just ever so slightly different causing it to not work for you. Doesn't seem like intentional non-support.

 

[Naster]

Lol was doing this since 2021.

 

[Minox]

View attachment 549619

Lol was doing this since 2021.

I low-key love this setup, it's so simple but does what it needs to

 

[NeoGranzon]

Looking at the text behind it it's indeed misinterpreting things but I would guess it comes from the hiragana usage. If you know the context it's easy to understand the correct/intended meaning, but assuming the AI is treating each new text one by one it likely has no context at all.


The latter is a more informal way of speaking hence it likely attempts to make it less formal in English as well which "Thank you guys" would achieve.

@Minox same speech about wrong translation goes for Labyrinth of Galleria:The Moon Society Yurika(ユリカ)=Eureka and Nachiru(ナチル)=Nachiroux in English watch and listen to the video i posted above.

 

[Minox]

@Minox same speech about wrong translation goes for Labyrinth of Galleria:The Moon Society Yurika(ユリカ)=Eureka and Nachiru(ナチル)=Nachiroux in English watch and listen to the video i posted above.

I didn't watch the video since it was 14min long and because I didn't know at what timestamp it happens, but is it not a similar issue where automatic translation will fail because it doesn't have the needed context of the game world?

 

[Deleted member 535703]

This is also a great tool for Japanese learners. Playing with the banner instead of an overlay can help build connections.

 

[tech3475]

Welp no support for xlibre. Thanks for making the tool that doesnt support xlibre.Anyways a great project but i will not install in my arch linux OS.

Considering that xlibre is supposed to be an updated X11, that would mean either sabotage, there's an issue with the translator's X11 implementation or xlibre is broken.

Besides checking the logs, I would consider installing an alternative DE using wayland for situations like this or try something like that software I cant recall the name of which allowed me to run Waydroid on X11/Cinnamon.

 

[NeoGranzon]

I didn't watch the video since it was 14min long and because I didn't know at what timestamp it happens, but is it not a similar issue where automatic translation will fail because it doesn't have the needed context of the game world?

@Minox see this

Too much effort?
Fast forward to the dialogue before and after the final battle and you'll see that what i wrote isn't nonsense.

 

[Minox]

@Minox see this

Too much effort?
Fast forward to the dialogue before and after the final battle and you'll see that what i wrote isn't nonsense.

Yes - Too much effort. You're linking me to longer and longer videos while giving vague explanations that doesn't help explain your point.

I don't know this game and you saying to look after the final battle doesn't actually help me pinpoint where I should be looking.

 

[NeoGranzon]

Yes - Too much effort. You're linking me to longer and longer videos while giving vague explanations that doesn't help explain your point.

I don't know this game and you saying to look after the final battle doesn't actually help me pinpoint where I should be looking.

@Minox do what you want,i gave you the tools to check,if you're lazy and don't want to look at that,that's your problem.

 

[AncientBoi]

My take on this is, I think this is a Good use of the AI Factor. Even though I don't play any games where I don't know wtf is being said, that might benefit me knowing in the game.

 

[SeltzerMist]

This might be the only way I'll ever get to play that Arc the Lad title on the WSC. I should consider getting a portable monitor for my living room for this.

 

[Weyu]

lmao def needs some tweaking

View attachment 549503
...

If that's taken from the tool in the opening post and it's set up properly, it definitely needs a lot more work or even a complete overhaul.
It looks like it struggles with capturing hiragana even though the text in that image is clear.
Somehow it seems to think くらす ('to live' — as in 'living alone') means ころす ('to kill') even though the characters look nothing alike. It also gets the name of the speaker wrong.

"I'm finally going to kill you by myself." is borderline word soup; the words are English but the sentence is nonsense. Can you think of a single instance where you would say that exact sentence in English?
Another problem is that the text in the bubble is one sentence, but the translation turns it into two and just entirely fabricated the "You did it, didn't you?" part because it interpreted the したんだな at the end as a separate sentence.
The two sentences added together also don't have any coherence, which puts it below even basic line-by-line translations done by human translators—which is one of the lowest forms of translation—as with those, you at least can tell what the original text meant.

Furthermore, the original line is a statement aimed at the reader, but the translation turns it into an action by the speaker, and the second sentence is even a question, and neither sentence even remotely conveys the meaning of the original text. It pretty much fails on every single level that it could have failed.

---

It's interesting that it's said to be aimed at retro games, which tend to have more kana than kanji, as that's one of the things it appears to fail at. Having it handle some normal text including kanji instead of the all-kana text like the above screenshots might produce more accurate results.
But from the screenshots in this thread, the translation ability seems very crude at this point, and it's definitely below something like Google Translate or DeepL, so you'd have to wait and see whether it improves in the future.

I'd say tools like that work best for single words like you'd see in command menus. For actual dialogue, the output tends to be subpar if you care about quality and accuracy. And at the level of those screenshots, it's worse than having no translation because almost everything is wrong and it would just confuse you.

 

[x65943]

If that's taken from the tool in the opening post and it's set up properly, it definitely needs a lot more work or even a complete overhaul.
It looks like it struggles with capturing hiragana even though the text in that image is clear.
Somehow it seems to think くらす ('to live' — as in 'living alone') means ころす ('to kill') even though the characters look nothing alike. It also gets the name of the speaker wrong.

"I'm finally going to kill you by myself." is borderline word soup; the words are English but the sentence is nonsense. Can you think of a single instance where you would say that exact sentence in English?
Another problem is that the text in the bubble is one sentence, but the translation turns it into two and just entirely fabricated the "You did it, didn't you?" part because it interpreted the したんだな at the end as a separate sentence.
The two sentences added together also don't have any coherence, which puts it below even basic line-by-line translations done by human translators—which is one of the lowest forms of translation—as with those, you at least can tell what the original text meant.

Furthermore, the original line is a statement aimed at the reader, but the translation turns it into an action by the speaker, and the second sentence is even a question, and neither sentence even remotely conveys the meaning of the original text. It pretty much fails on every single level that it could have failed.

---

It's interesting that it's said to be aimed at retro games, which tend to have more kana than kanji, as that's one of the things it appears to fail at. Having it handle some normal text including kanji instead of the all-kana text like the above screenshots might produce more accurate results.
But from the screenshots in this thread, the translation ability seems very crude at this point, and it's definitely below something like Google Translate or DeepL, so you'd have to wait and see whether it improves in the future.

I'd say tools like that work best for single words like you'd see in command menus. For actual dialogue, the output tends to be subpar if you care about quality and accuracy. And at the level of those screenshots, it's worse than having no translation because almost everything is wrong and it would just confuse you.

My suspicion is it's trained on kana/gana/kanji that are like 10x5 pixels or similar

I think it wasn't trained for n64 and that's probably why it's misreading everything

when I played a gameboy color game it was for the most part much more accurate

so I was judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree (to some extent)

as my screenshot above shows it still did get things wrong in thomas the thank engine for GBC, but was MUCH better and I actually felt like it added to the experience of the game vs no text

 

[Weyu]

as my screenshot above shows it still did get things wrong in thomas the thank engine for GBC, but was MUCH better and I actually felt like it added to the experience of the game vs no text

I dunno. For the start menu, you can at least kind of see what it's trying to say because, as said, the shorter the text, the more accurate it tends to be. But in the following three screenshots, it gets everything wrong again and doesn't manage to convey the meaning at all even though the sentences are all simple.

 

[x65943]

I dunno. For the start menu, you can at least kind of see what it's trying to say because, as said, the shorter the text, the more accurate it tends to be. But in the following three screenshots, it gets everything wrong again and doesn't manage to convey the meaning at all even though the sentences are all simple.

I cherry picked the wrong ones - I actually had to play the game for a little bit to find some really stupid translations

unlike animal crossing where every sentence was gibberish

 

[JaNDeRPeiCH]

Considering that xlibre is supposed to be an updated X11, that would mean either sabotage, there's an issue with the translator's X11 implementation or xlibre is broken.

Besides checking the logs, I would consider installing an alternative DE using wayland for situations like this or try something like that software I cant recall the name of which allowed me to run Waydroid on X11/Cinnamon.

Sabotage or not im not blaming at xlibre dev. The tool offline should make the support for xlibre, because source code its available for everyone to contribute it. If the author of this tool doesnt want to support it, i will respect the dev decision. I will not change to wayland due to perfomance issues.

 

[GengarsGhostlyGiggles]

View attachment 549619

Lol was doing this since 2021.

what's that setup ?