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.

Controls

Default hotkeys (configurable in config.yml):

Key	Action
`Space`	Toggle overlay on/off
`m`	Switch mode: banner ↔ inplace
`-`	Decrease font size
`=`	Increase font size
`q`	Quit

In banner mode, you can drag the overlay to reposition it.

Custom Hotkeys

You can customize hotkeys in config.yml:

hotkeys:
  toggle_overlay: "space"   # Toggle overlay on/off
  switch_mode: "m"          # Switch between banner/inplace
  increase_font: "="        # Increase font size
  decrease_font: "-"        # Decrease font size
  quit: "q"                 # Quit application

Supported key values:

Single characters: a-z, 0-9, `, -, =, etc.
Function keys: f1-f12
Special keys: space, escape, enter, tab, backspace, delete, insert, home, end, page_up, page_down, up, down, left, right

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

Edit config.yml:

# Window to capture (partial title match)
window_title: "Tales"

# Refresh rate in seconds
refresh_rate: 0.5

# OCR confidence threshold (0.0-1.0)
# Filters out garbage text by average per-line confidence
ocr_confidence: 0.6

# Subtitle appearance
font_size: 24
font_color: "#FFFFFF"
background_color: "#404040"

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 ocr_confidence in config. 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
Mode cycling - Press m to switch between off/banner/inplace
Font size adjustment - Press -/= to resize on the fly
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