RuneLingua: translation included with your RuneTranslate subscription

Translating a game used to be two bills. RuneTranslate did the work of pulling the text out of the game, keeping the control codes safe and writing a playable build back, and then somebody else did the translating: a DeepL plan, an OpenAI or Anthropic key, a DeepSeek balance that ran out on chapter four. Version 1.0.8 folds the second bill into the first. RuneLingua is RuneTranslate’s own AI-powered machine translation, it runs on a GPU we host, and it is included with a Supporter or Pro membership. One subscription, one tool, the whole game translated.

What RuneLingua is

RuneLingua is an AI-powered translation provider that sits in the provider list next to DeepL and Google Translate, with one difference: there is nothing to set up. No account with another company, no API key to paste, no per-character invoice. You pick it at the top of the provider dropdown in the project editor, or under the new Account group in Settings → Providers, and press Translate.

Behind it is an AI model built for one job, machine translation: Tencent’s open-weight Hy-MT2, from the research line that took first place in 30 of the 31 language tracks at the WMT25 translation shared task. It is a translator, not a chatbot asked to translate, so it answers with the translated line and nothing else. It runs on a server RuneTranslate rents by the second, so the engine costs nothing while nobody is translating and wakes for the first batch of a run.

One subscription covers the tool and the translation

RuneLingua is metered by a monthly character quota on your account, counted in source characters actually sent to the engine. Lines answered from Translation Memory and lines your exclusion rules skip cost nothing.

• Supporter, $3.99 a month: 1,500,000 characters a month. An average game runs around 250,000 characters, so that is about six games.
• Pro, $5.99 a month: 2,500,000 characters a month, about ten average games, for people who translate in bulk or queue several projects at once.
• Free: RuneLingua is not included, but everything else still is: every engine, every other provider with your own key, the editor, the save editor and the patch exporter.

The Settings card shows exactly where you stand: characters used, characters left, the date the quota resets (the first of every month), and how much of the shared server capacity the whole community has used, so a busy month never comes as a surprise. The same meter is on your account page on this site.

Languages

RuneLingua translates between 21 languages: English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Arabic, Turkish, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, both European and Brazilian. That covers Japanese-to-English, the pair most RuneTranslate projects are, and the Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese and Korean targets that grew fastest this year.

Fourteen of the app’s target languages are not offered, mostly the Nordic, Baltic and Balkan ones plus Mongolian. The card lists them, and the pre-run check warns you before a run starts, the same way it does for the DeepL gaps, so you can send those projects through another provider instead.

What it does not do, on purpose

RuneLingua is AI-powered machine translation, not a chat model. It never appears as an AI refiner, it takes no custom prompt, and it will not rewrite a scene for tone. That keeps it fast and predictable, and it is why the quota is measured in characters rather than tokens. If a project wants the refiner pass, the LLM providers are still there with your own key; RuneLingua is the one that is already paid for.

Everything RuneTranslate does around a provider still applies. Placeholders and engine control codes are masked before a line leaves your PC and restored afterwards, the glossary substitutes your pinned terms, Translation Memory reuses lines you have already translated, and a line that comes back in the wrong alphabet is marked failed rather than done.

Privacy and what leaves your PC

Only the text of the lines being translated is sent, in batches, to your RuneTranslate account, which forwards it to the engine and returns the translations. Nothing is stored on the way through: only the character count is kept, for your monthly quota, and the engine keeps no copy of the batch. Your game files never leave your machine, exactly as with every other provider.

Starting the engine

Because the engine shuts down when nobody is using it, the first batch of a run after a quiet period wakes it. When that happens, the progress line reads engine starting and the run continues by itself, usually within seconds, occasionally within half a minute. Nothing is charged for the wait. Every wake costs GPU time, so the card deliberately has no Test button and opening Settings never starts the engine: only a real run does.

How to try it

• Update to RuneTranslate 1.0.8 or newer, and sign in with an account that has Supporter or Pro.
• Open a project, pick RuneLingua at the top of the provider dropdown, and press Translate.
• Watch the quota on Settings → Providers → RuneLingua; the numbers update as the run goes.
• Not a member yet? The Supporter tier is $3.99 a month, and it now includes the translation itself.

RuneLingua exists because members paid for RuneTranslate before it had an engine of its own, and because free users kept reporting the lines that broke. This is that support coming back as a translate button that costs nothing extra to press.