AI Connections: let Claude Desktop translate inside your project

Machine translation is fast, but it doesn't know your game. It doesn't know that 響 is a character whose fan-wiki spells her “Hibiki,” or that a particular item keeps its Japanese name in the official localization. You end up doing that research yourself, line by line. AI Connections hands that part to Claude.

New in RuneTranslate, AI Connections lets you link the desktop app to Claude Desktop. Once they're connected, you just talkto Claude about your project — “find the lines I haven't translated,” “look up this character's official English name,” “translate the rest and keep the honorifics” — and it does the work right inside RuneTranslate. The magic part: Claude uses its own web searchto look things up, then writes consistent translations straight back into your project. It's like having a translator who researches the game first.

How it works at a glance

RuneTranslate runs a tiny server on your own PC that Claude Desktop can talk to (it's built on the open MCPstandard — Model Context Protocol). Through it, Claude can list and search your projects, and — on a paid plan — apply translations, build a glossary, run the translation engine, and export the finished build. Nothing happens until you switch it on, and the connection never leaves your computer.

Setting it up (about a minute)

You'll need the Claude Desktop app installed. Then:

1. In RuneTranslate, open Settings → AI Connections and switch it on.
2. Click Install Desktop Extension. RuneTranslate opens Claude Desktop with the extension ready to install — approve it, and paste your connection token (shown right there in Settings) when asked.
3. Fully quit and reopen Claude Desktop, then say: “List my RuneTranslate projects.”

That's it — Claude can now see your projects. (Prefer to wire it up by hand? There's also an “Add via config” option that writes Claude's config file for you, plus a copy-the-config fallback.)

A worked example

Say you're translating an RPG and want your character names to stay consistent. A conversation might go like this:

• You: List my RuneTranslate projects.
  Claude: You have 3 — Mahou Quest (Japanese → English, 62% done), …
• You: In Mahou Quest, find every untranslated line that mentions 響.
  Claude:Found 14 lines. 響 looks like a character name…
• You:Look up the official romanization for that character, then add a glossary entry so it's always the same.
  Claude: The game's wiki spells it “Hibiki.”I've added 響 → Hibiki to your glossary.
• You:Great — now translate the remaining lines and keep Japanese honorifics like -san.
  Claude:Done — 14 lines translated and saved back to the project.
• You: Export the translated build to D:\Games\MahouQuest-EN.
  Claude:Exported. ✓

Every change lands in RuneTranslate — open it and you'll see the new translations, the glossary entry, and the exported build waiting for you. You're still in the editor for anything you want to tweak by hand.

What Claude can do — free vs paid

The split mirrors the rest of RuneTranslate: free to look, a Supporter plan to act.

• Everyone (free): connect Claude, and let it browse and search your projects and your glossary. Great for reviewing where a translation stands and planning the work.
• Supporter & Pro: the actions — translate lines, build and edit glossaries, run the translation engine, and export the finished build. Running a translation uses your own configured provider and runs at your normal full speed.

It researches the game for you

This is what makes it more than a chat wrapper. When Claude translates a line, it can lean on its ownweb search — a game's wiki, fan translations, a character database — to settle the things machine translation guesses at: a heroine's established English name, an item's official spelling, whether a term is usually left in Japanese. Ask it to capture those as glossary entries and they'll be force-substituted across every line and every provider from then on, so the name in chapter 1 matches the name in chapter 47. If you want a second pass for tone and phrasing afterwards, RuneTranslate's AI refiner still works exactly as it does on any other project.

Your projects stay yours

AI Connections is off until you switch it on, and it only runs on your own computer. Claude Desktop reaches RuneTranslate over a private local link (loopback only, 127.0.0.1) guarded by a token that lives only on your machine — requests without it, or coming from a web page, are refused. You can regenerate the token at any time to cut off existing connections. (When Claude translates a line, that text is processed by Claude the same way any message you send it is.)

Good to know

• Claude Desktop, specifically.v1 targets the Claude Desktop app, which can reach a server on your own PC. (Browser ChatGPT connectors run in the cloud and can't see localhost, so they're out for now.)
• One-click, no extra tools.The Desktop Extension installs without Node or npx. RuneTranslate finds Claude Desktop and opens it with the extension for you — whether you installed Claude from Anthropic directly or from the Microsoft Store.
• It's an opt-in.If you never open Settings → AI Connections, nothing changes about how RuneTranslate works.

Wrapping up

Extractors get the text out of a game; providers turn it into another language. AI Connections adds the part that used to be all yours — the research, the consistency, the “wait, what's this character actually called?” — and lets you hand it to an assistant that can look it up and write it straight back in.

Download RuneTranslate, open Settings → AI Connections, and introduce Claude to your project.