How to translate an SRPG Studio game to English (full walkthrough)

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 translating an SRPG Studio game end-to-end with RuneTranslate: unpacking data.dts, extracting the story / database / event text, 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 SDTSarchive 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-effortengine: very new or custom-keyed builds may fall outside the tool's range, so verify the exported build runs before redistributing.

Step 2: How the text gets extracted

SRPG Studio stores its project as a structured data file inside the archive. RuneTranslate unpacks it and lists every translatable source-language string (Japanese by default; any supported source language), grouped by source:

• Story & maps— chapter/scene text, map names, and victory / defeat conditions.
• Database— unit, class, item, and skill names and descriptions.
• Events— message, talk, and choice command text, with speaker names.

Internal command discriminators and system identifiers (the structural type: "message" tokens, config keys, and the like) are automatically classified as excluded, so the editor shows you 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; OpenAI GPT-4o or Anthropic Claude handle 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. Free-tier RuneTranslate is throttled ~3–4× slower than paid — same output quality.

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.