Translate Japanese games with DeepSeek — LLM quality, tiny cost

RuneTranslate ships DeepSeekas a first-class translation provider — and if you translate Japanese games with DeepSeekand watch the LLM bill, it's the one to know about. DeepSeek gives you genuine large-language-model translation — context-aware, character-voice-preserving — at a fraction of the price of GPT-4o or Claude. Bring your own key, pick a model, and translate.

It sits in Settings → Providersunder “Cloud · API key,” right next to OpenAI and Anthropic, and works with every RuneTranslate feature — provider routing, the AI refiner, glossaries, and translation memory.

Why it's cheap (not worse)

DeepSeek's API speaks the standard chat-completions protocol, and RuneTranslate ships it as a dedicated provider with the same batching, retry-with-backoff, and JSON parsing it uses for the other LLMs — just pointed at DeepSeek's endpoint with your key. The low price is DeepSeek's pricing, not a downgrade: it prices its models several times below the big Western labs, so a whole visual novel that would cost a few dollars on GPT-4o typically comes out to cents.

The two models

deepseek-v4-flash — the default

Best for:almost everything. Fast, extremely cheap, and strong on Japanese → English (and 30+ other targets). It's the recommended default and the model id is pre-filled. Roughly $0.14 / $0.28 per million input/output tokens— a typical 10,000-line game is a few cents.

deepseek-v4-pro — the ceiling

Best for:dense, stylized dialogue — eroge, character-driven visual novels, heavy slang or wordplay. Still cheap by LLM standards (about $0.44 / $0.87 per million). The model field is free text with these two as suggestions, so if DeepSeek ships a newer id you just type it — no app update needed.

Quality on Japanese games

Because it's a real LLM, not statistical MT, DeepSeek reads the surrounding lines and keeps register consistent — formal NPC vs colloquial party member — the same context-awareness that makes GPT-4o and Claude good at visual novels. It handles CJK source text natively and keeps stylized speech instead of flattening everyone to textbook English.

As with every LLM, the last 10% is a hand-edit pass in the RuneTranslate editor — and on Supporter / Pro those fixes land in your translation memory so the same line comes back instantly, free, in the next game. Pair DeepSeek with a glossary to lock character and place names before the batch ever reaches the provider.

Set it up in a minute

1. Get a key at platform.deepseek.com/api_keys and add a little credit.
2. In RuneTranslate open Settings → Providers, pick DeepSeekunder “Cloud · API key,” paste the key, and press Test.
3. Leave the model as deepseek-v4-flash (or type deepseek-v4-pro) and star it as your default provider.
4. Open a project, auto-detect the engine, and translate. Your key stays encrypted on your own machine — RuneTranslate never sees it.

Free vs paid

DeepSeek works on every tier— it's your key, your cost. On the free tier it's throttled like the other cloud LLMs (fewer parallel batches, a short pause between them), so a big game runs modestly slower — roughly twice, not many times over. Supporter and Pro remove the throttle for full-speed translation. Either way the DeepSeek bill is tiny.

Which provider should you use?

• Cheapest LLM quality, any genre:DeepSeek v4-flash — the new default answer to “context-aware translation without GPT/Claude prices.”
• Best reading on a hard VN:deepseek-v4-pro or Claude — and with DeepSeek the cost difference barely matters.
• Mix and route: on Supporter+, keep dialogue on DeepSeek and send item/menu strings to free Google via provider routing — a whole game for pennies.

Download RuneTranslateand try DeepSeek on a real game — it works on every engine RuneTranslate supports, and the free tier lets you test it end-to-end before you commit.