AI live in game translation tools for emulators

[marxcore]

There are so many untranslated we are all just waiting to sink our teeth into. I had recently consider an AI translation such as the one built into retroarch. Anyone mess around with one of these to live translate your game while you play on an emulator? I'm familiar with the google lense trick with bluestacks and a screen mirror, but that is just to tedious.

 

[Spike's iconSpike]

I used https://ztranslate.net/ and it wasn't very good...
I tried it on release, this was 2019. I came back years later I think 2023 thinking they must have improved it but nope, nothing was done, last update in 2020.

Now this could be 100% my fault, but I did spend my couple of hours trying to understand it and set everything right and retry and retry and retry. But after a while I gave up.

Don't let my negative experience discourage you, I'm sure there are people out there that had none of my problems.
If you try it let me know how it goes.

 

[marxcore]

I used https://ztranslate.net/ and it wasn't very good...
I tried it on release, this was 2019. I came back years later I think 2023 thinking they must have improved it but nope, nothing was done, last update in 2020.

Now this could be 100% my fault, but I did spend my couple of hours trying to understand it and set everything right and retry and retry and retry. But after a while I gave up.

Don't let my negative experience discourage you, I'm sure there are people out there that had none of my problems.
If you try it let me know how it goes.

Thanks for the recommendation. I will definaitly try it out.

 

[otogirisou]

retroarch is the simplest, i think. But i find it still redundant so i drop it and started learning japanese instead.

 

[Spike's iconSpike]

retroarch is the simplest, i think. But i find it still redundant so i drop it and started learning japanese instead.

Yes it's the same thing, retroarch uses ztranslate.

 

[Naxil]

Hello, but for pc exist a translate program on the screen?

 

[Spike's iconSpike]

Hello, but for pc exist a translate program on the screen?

There's this https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnove...lo_i_made_a_game_translator_using_ocr_mort_i/

 

[Waffle_the_Great]

I'm curious if they've ever thought of almost doing a translation repository. I'm probably wording this wrong, but if Retroarch has the ability to machine translate a game (I couldn't get it working but I think it logs it from somewhere else?) Why not essentially make a log essentially that people can submit changes to the dialogue so it updates it correctly. In essence, as people play a game and make their changes, you'd eventually wind up with a translated game that's been proofread and changed based on suggestions. That way when the dialogue is displayed on screen, the game already knows based on the file created to display the proper dialogue based on what was submitted.

Or, am I misinterpreting things and in lala land? :)

 

[McWiggles]

The only thing I've used that I've been happy enough with is Gaminik. I do most of my retro-gaming via my Android device and on my PC I like to play text-heavy deep Japanese strategy games. I pay a monthly fee via the Google Play store which gives me simultaneous access to both the Android and Windows versions.

Here's a screenshot of Taiko Risshiden V DX that I bought via Steam being used via Gaminik before and after. Gaminik offers several translation engines. I use Google Gemini because it's a good balance of quality, speed and taking us less credits.

You can set it to auto translate a region or manually do screenshot translations. Most games have the text bar down the bottom, so it's usually fine to designate a region for auto translation.

gaminik.net (Just a link, I don't get any commission or anything like that!)

Post automatically merged: Dec 2, 2024

I'm curious if they've ever thought of almost doing a translation repository. I'm probably wording this wrong, but if Retroarch has the ability to machine translate a game (I couldn't get it working but I think it logs it from somewhere else?) Why not essentially make a log essentially that people can submit changes to the dialogue so it updates it correctly. In essence, as people play a game and make their changes, you'd eventually wind up with a translated game that's been proofread and changed based on suggestions. That way when the dialogue is displayed on screen, the game already knows based on the file created to display the proper dialogue based on what was submitted.

Or, am I misinterpreting things and in lala land? :)

I've not used this function, but I know a recent update has "Glossary of Terms" that would essentially let you designate the text of certain phrases and sentences. It's very useful as the translation engine doesn't need to do the heavy lifting for certain sentences that are most likely repeated ad-nauseum in the game.

 

[StopTheCatastrophe]

I'm curious if they've ever thought of almost doing a translation repository. I'm probably wording this wrong, but if Retroarch has the ability to machine translate a game (I couldn't get it working but I think it logs it from somewhere else?) Why not essentially make a log essentially that people can submit changes to the dialogue so it updates it correctly. In essence, as people play a game and make their changes, you'd eventually wind up with a translated game that's been proofread and changed based on suggestions. That way when the dialogue is displayed on screen, the game already knows based on the file created to display the proper dialogue based on what was submitted.

Or, am I misinterpreting things and in lala land? :)

There's a few reasons why that's impossible, unless people do complicated volunteer programming work to make tools for it.

• When using emulators, your device and OS have no access to what the *text* is in the game when it's displayed, even though it's being displayed. The text can be encoded in crazy ways in the game data, and the emulator replicates how the original hardware processed the code. When you open a text file on your computer, your OS knows exactly how the text was encoded and what text to display... this is not the case for game emulation. This is why you can always copy/paste text in a browser or text file or native app, but you can never copy onscreen text from inside an emulated game like that. (It's a bit like a road-sign in a movie where a character is driving down the highway: yes you see what words are on the sign, but the device playing the video has no idea there's a word there. So if you wanted to translate the road-sign in the movie, it's much more complicated than you might first think. Though with a game, there is ultimately a theoretical method to get the text without OCR (unless the text is a texture), because there is a text encoding somewhere, unlike the movie which is purely a visual file and would require OCR.)
• In order for your system to know what the text in-game is, you'd need an OCR application that reads what is displayed in a window. Google Lens translate, and Microsoft's similar app, can do this, if you aim them at the screen, for example. And some apps exist where you run it and it translates and correctly formats whatever words were displayed. Or, you'd need a specific tool that was specifically programmed to read the memory address / textbox info in-game and usefully connect that to a database of translations, or something.
• Also, your description misses the required connection between *when* and *what exact* text corresponds to a person's "Log" for proofread/corrections/suggestions. If a player sees a line in the game and writes a translation for it, how does the system know where to insert/replace the translation? With a TV show, subtitles can simply use timings, because the same words or captions should happen at the same exact moment for everyone. But in a videogame, text will appear at different times for everyone based on what they're doing in the game. So, you can't go by time. The original text can be anywhere within a giant chunk of data. (Or in the case of a texture replacement translation, like can often be used in PCSX2 (PS2 emulator) which has a function for this, the "text" is a picture file in the game data assets, you have to dump the textures and then make a modified texture file with English, and PCSX2 will load the replacement file if configured.)

In other words, someone would have to program a tool that does the following:

• Reads the specific textbox or dialog line(?) ID or memory address for the specific game, whenever text is displayed. (But games are all programmed differently.)
• Dumps the associated original-language text into a file, labelled by the ID
• Links or pulls from a data entry file or box somewhere where the user typed in their intended translation, with the same ID.
• With a front-end that a random user can use. (Not the same as a tool that an experienced programmer makes or uses.)

A separate OCR app "laid" over the game window is a great solution for translating whatever is on the screen, but if you want people to contribute edits and translations as they go it can't be OCR, it has to be systematically coded to correspond to the correct game data.