Translate, stream and clip any game

Games that were never released in your language are some of the best things to stream: a visual novel that only came out in Japanese, a Chinese indie RPG, a cult classic nobody ever localised. Nobody else in your category is playing them, and every scene is a surprise. They are also the hardest to stream well. You cannot react to a twist you cannot read, your chat cannot follow the story, and a four-hour broadcast is not what new viewers find anyway. They find the clips.

This guide puts two Windows apps together. RuneTranslate turns the game into a playable build in your language before you go live, and LunarClip, a local AI video clipper, turns the recording into short vertical clips with captions afterwards. Both do the heavy work on your own PC and both have a free plan, so you can try the whole workflow on your next stream.

What you need

• A copy of the game that you own, installed and playable on Windows.
• RuneTranslate. The free plan covers every engine and every translation provider; it only limits speed and how many projects you keep at once.
• Your usual streaming or recording software, such as OBS Studio.
• LunarClip, a desktop app for Windows 10 and 11. Its free plan adds a watermark and exports up to 720p; the paid plans remove the watermark and raise the resolution.
• A look at the publisher’s streaming guidelines. Many publishers, Japanese ones especially, post rules for streaming and monetising their games, and some say how they feel about fan translations.

Step 1: translate the game before you go live

Point RuneTranslate at the game folder and it detects the engine by itself: RPG Maker, Ren’Py, Unity, Kirikiri, Wolf RPG, TyranoBuilder and the rest of its 18 engines and formats. Pick a translation provider, press Translate, then export. The export is a separate, playable copy of the game in your language, and the original folder is never changed. The beginner’s walkthrough covers every click.

Do this before the stream, not during it. A runtime overlay that translates each line as it appears can add a pause before every line, and when it fails it fails on camera, in the middle of a scene. A translated build has nothing running beside it: the game simply reads in your language, so the stream looks and paces like a native release.

Fix what viewers will notice first

Machine translation gets the story across, and a few things are worth fixing by hand before an audience sees them. Character names should be spelled the same way every time, so add them to the glossary before you translate. Decide once whether to keep honorifics like -san and -chan. Then skim the first hour of dialogue in the editor, because the opening scenes are the ones your first stream will show.

Test the build off stream

Launch the exported build, start a new game, save and load once, and open the menus. If the dialogue box shows empty squares, the font has no letters for your language, and why translated text shows as boxes explains the fix. If the game will not start at all, find the bad line before the stream finds it for you.

Step 2: stream and record the translated build

To your streaming software the translated build is just the game, so capture it the way you capture anything else. A few habits make the clipping step much better later:

• Keep the facecam in one corner. LunarClip’s Game framing puts your webcam on top and the gameplay underneath, wherever the webcam sits, as long as it stays put.
• Talk. Most visual novels and RPGs have little or no voice acting, so your voice is the audio the clipper transcribes and scores. Read the big lines aloud and react out loud; silence gives it nothing to pick from.
• Keep a local recording. Record a copy on your PC alongside the broadcast. LunarClip takes a video file or a public YouTube link, and a local file keeps the full quality. The free plan accepts videos up to two hours long, the paid plans longer ones.
• Make the text readable on a phone. In a vertical clip the dialogue box is a thin strip of a small screen. If the game has a text size or message window option, turn it up.

Step 3: turn the recording into Shorts with LunarClip

LunarClip is an AI video clipper for Windows. Give it the recording, or a YouTube link to the VOD, and it finds the strongest moments, scores them with the reasons it picked each one, and crops them into vertical clips with captions. You review the clips, adjust them and download the ones you want. These are the settings that matter for a translated game:

• Type: Game. Facecam on top, gameplay filling the rest. Auto can choose a type from the title, tags and sound, but set Game yourself for a facecam stream. With no facecam and little talking, Sports follows the action instead.
• Aspect ratio: 9:16 for YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Reels. 4:5 and 1:1 suit feeds, and 16:9 keeps a normal widescreen clip.
• Captions in the language you speak. Captions are transcribed from the speech in the video, in 46 languages or with automatic detection, in one of 18 caption templates. A few languages, among them Vietnamese, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, are not supported for captions yet; the LunarClip FAQ keeps the current list.
• Trim to the line. Before rendering you can move each clip’s start and end and correct its captions and framing. End a clip on the line of dialogue that caused the reaction, not two seconds after it.

Like RuneTranslate, LunarClip keeps your files on your PC. It transcribes and renders locally and sends only short transcript excerpts to its server to pick the moments, which is why it needs an internet connection while it makes a project. RuneTranslate, in the same way, sends only the text of the lines being translated to the provider you choose, and nothing at all when that provider is a local model.

Why the translation makes the clips better

A clip of an untranslated game asks a stranger to trust your reaction. A clip of the translated build shows them the cause: the twist, the absurd item description, the villain’s last line, written in their language in the game’s own dialogue box. That is what lets a fifteen-second clip work in a feed with no context and the sound off. Your commentary arrives as captions, the game’s text is already translated, and the viewer can follow both.

Checklist for your next stream

1. Translate and export the game in RuneTranslate, fix the names, and test the build off stream.
2. Capture the translated build with your facecam in a fixed corner, your commentary on and a local recording running.
3. Import the recording into LunarClip, set the type to Game and the aspect ratio to 9:16, and pick your caption language.
4. Trim each clip so it lands on the line, download, and post.

Download RuneTranslate to translate the game, and get LunarClip for the clips. Both are free to start.