Offline screen translator for Japanese retro games
Project description
Interpreter
Offline screen translator for Japanese retro games. Captures text from any window, performs OCR, translates to English, and displays subtitles in a floating overlay.
Features
- Fully offline - No cloud APIs, no internet required after setup
- Free - No API costs or subscriptions
- Private - Text never leaves your machine
- Optimized for retro games - Uses MeikiOCR, trained specifically on Japanese game text
- Two overlay modes - Banner (subtitle bar) or inplace (text over game)
- Translation caching - Fuzzy matching avoids re-translating similar text
Requirements
- Python 3.11+ (Python 3.14 not yet supported)
- Windows 10 version 1903+, macOS, or Linux (X11/XWayland)
Installation
One-liner Install
macOS/Linux:
curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bquenin/interpreter/main/install.sh | bash
Windows (PowerShell):
powershell -c "irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bquenin/interpreter/main/install.ps1 | iex"
Then run with interpreter-v2.
Upgrading
To update to the latest version, run the install script again:
macOS/Linux:
curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bquenin/interpreter/main/install.sh | bash
Windows (PowerShell):
powershell -c "irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bquenin/interpreter/main/install.ps1 | iex"
Usage
interpreter-v2
This opens the GUI where you can select a window to capture and configure all settings.
Hotkeys
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
Space |
Toggle overlay on/off (configurable in GUI) |
In banner mode, you can drag the overlay to reposition it.
Overlay Modes
Banner Mode (default)
A subtitle bar at the bottom of the screen displaying translated text. Draggable, opaque background, centered text.
Inplace Mode
Transparent overlay positioned over the game window. Translated text appears directly over the original Japanese text at OCR-detected positions. Click-through so you can interact with the game.
Configuration
All settings are configured through the GUI and saved to ~/.interpreter/config.yml.
How It Works
- Screen Capture - Captures the target window at the configured refresh rate
- OCR - MeikiOCR extracts Japanese text (optimized for pixel fonts)
- Translation - Sugoi V4 translates Japanese to English
- Display - Shows translated text in the selected overlay mode
Troubleshooting
Poor OCR accuracy
Try adjusting the OCR confidence slider in the GUI. Lower values include more text (but may include garbage), higher values are stricter.
Slow performance
First run downloads models (~1.5GB). Subsequent runs use cached models from ~/.cache/huggingface/.
What's New in v2
- Inplace overlay mode - Text appears directly over game text
- Translation caching - Fuzzy matching reduces redundant translations
- Improved OCR - Punctuation excluded from confidence calculation
- Better window capture - Excludes overlapping windows, auto-detects fullscreen
- Multi-display support - Overlay appears on the same display as the game
Release history Release notifications | RSS feed
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