How to translate an SRPG Studio game to English

SRPG Studio (SapphireSoft) is the dedicated tactical-RPG maker behind a large catalogue of Japanese strategy RPGs — many of them commercial doujin titles on DLsite. Everything those games display is packed into an encrypted data.dts archive, so the usual text-injection tools never see a single line. This guide walks through how to translate an SRPG Studio game end-to-end with RuneTranslate: unpacking data.dts, extracting every in-game string, and repacking a playable build.

What you need

• RuneTranslate for Windows— v0.15.0 or later.
• An SRPG Studio game folder — the directory containing game.exe, data.dts, and runtime.rts.
• A target language (English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Italian, Turkish, Vietnamese, and 20+ more).
• One translation provider. Free Google Translate works out of the box; DeepL has a free tier; OpenAI, Anthropic, and any OpenAI-compatible API (OpenRouter, NanoGPT) are bring-your-own-key. For story-heavy tactical RPGs, DeepL or an LLM is usually the best balance.

Step 1: Open the game folder

Launch RuneTranslate, click New project, and point it at the SRPG Studio game directory. Engine detection recognises the SDTS archive signature automatically. A bundled native sidecar — built from the MIT-licensed SRPG-ToolBox and shipped inside the installer — unpacks data.dts into a per-project workspace. Your original game folder is never touched. This is a best-effort engine: very new or custom-keyed builds may fall outside the tool's range, so verify the exported build runs before you rely on it.

Step 2: How the text gets extracted

SRPG Studio stores its whole project as structured JSON inside the archive. The sidecar unpacks it, and RuneTranslate walks every string in that data, listing each translatable source-language line (Japanese by default; any supported source language) grouped by the file it came from. There's no semantic sorting into story / database / event buckets — you simply get every in-game string, organised by source file. In practice that spans scenario dialogue, map and chapter text, unit / class / item / skill names and descriptions, and event choices.

Structural discriminators and system identifiers (the internal type tokens, config keys, and the like) are automatically classified as excluded, so the editor shows real in-game text by default rather than thousands of engine internals.

Step 3: Translate

Pick a provider and run. DeepL is a strong default for narrative and battle conversations; an LLM (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek) handles stylized speech and onomatopoeia better; free Google Translate or a local model (Ollama / LM Studio) covers menus and item names. Provider routing can split short strings to a cheaper lane. The free tier is throttled modestly on speed (roughly 2× slower on AI providers, less on the free scrapers) — same output quality as paid.

Glossary your playable cast, recurring bosses, class names, and signature skills up front so every roster screen, status panel, and battle conversation renders them identically — see Glossary 101.

Step 4: Repack and export

Click Export. RuneTranslate copies the game, writes your translations back into the project data, and repacks data.dts. The output is a full, runnable copy of the game in the location you choose — run it and it plays in your target language, with no loader or runtime overlay needed.

Known limitations

• Best-effort: confirm the exported game launches and reads correctly before sharing it.
• Very new or custom-keyed SRPG Studio builds may not unpack until the underlying tool gains support.
• Images, hand-drawn UI text, and audio are not translated — that's outside machine-translation scope.

See the SRPG Studio engine page for the full feature list, or download RuneTranslate and try it on a real game.