JRPG Translator：用于玩日文游戏并可选辅助日语学习的 Windows 小工具

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on a Windows tool called JRPG Translator mostly for myself but thought it might be interesting to some people here—especially anyone with a decades old list of Japanese games they’d love to play and maybe got motivated to study Japanese too (I try it now a second time since we don't need to use these ridiculous huge Kanji dictionaries anymore ). Nothing commercial, just something I made for fun and is free on Github.

It captures text from a game and shows an AI translation in an overlay. There’s also audio translation for spoken dialogue. It works through screen capturing in the background rather than modifying the game, so you can use it with emulators.
Of course this has been done before but I never found anything that you could set up to be really seamless and comes with some optional study features, so I made this as a hobby project over the last year. Beside translations it can optionally also show a transcript with Kanji readings and save detailed explanations of grammar and nuances in a sentence in a library from where you can create flashcards directly to Anki including a screenshot from where the sentence or vocabulary appeared in the game.

I’ve also spent quite a bit of time making it usable with a controller. There’s a fullscreen interface and optional LaunchBox/Big Box integration for loading settings automatically per game. You don’t need LaunchBox to use it, but I would recommend it since LaunchBox has a great plugin architecture which I use and with the plugin you have a menu entry allowing you to launch the tool per game automatically when you start playing a game with an individual profile for overlay position, size, color and so on, so once set up the tool works totally seamless, you launch your game and the rest works automatically. Also JoyToKey can be automatically launched with a profile which is useful if you want to map multiple functions to a single button for some games like short press on a button to request an explanation and long press on the same button to hide/unhide the overlay showing the explanations.

As I said the part I’m particularly interested in is making it useful for learning Japanese, too. You can ask for an explanation of the dialogue, including vocabulary and grammar, save interesting passages in a Study Library, and turn selected sentences or words into Anki cards to review later on your phone.

It uses Gemini or OpenAI with your own API key, so usage may cost money depending on the model and tier. Right now Google offers a free tier Gemini API key which might be enough depending on how much you use the tool. Otherwise requests with the smaller/faster models (which I recommend since it is only fun if you get the translations within 1 to 2 seceonds) only cost fractions of a cent and you pay upfront, so there is no subscription you need to remember to cancel both for Gemini or OpenAI.

The project, screenshots and manual are here:
JRPG Translator on GitHub

A (long but with chapters) video where I explain all the features you can see here:

If anyone gives it a try, I’d be interested to hear which games you use it with and what feels awkward or could work better. There are probably still bugs hiding in there!