Comparison

RuneTranslate vs XUnity.AutoTranslator

RuneTranslate reads a game’s own data files — across 17 engines and formats, Unity among them — pulls every string into a project you can edit, and writes out a playable translated copy of the game that you keep. XUnity.AutoTranslator takes the other route: it loads into a running Unity game and swaps each string as it reaches the text component. That difference decides the rest of this page — how many of your games are covered, how much control you have before a player reads a line, and what you are holding when you finish.

Made by: bbepis
Licence: MIT
Runs on: Windows (Unity games)

The short version

RuneTranslate handles the whole job in one app: 17 engines and formats — RPG Maker MV/MZ and XP/VX/Ace, Ren’Py, Kirikiri/KAG, Wolf RPG 2.x and 3.x, TyranoBuilder, Electron and Cocos Creator shells, Unity on Mono and IL2CPP, Unreal Engine 4/5, Godot, RPG Developer Bakin, SRPG Studio, NScripter/ONScripter, Artemis, YU-RIS, AliceSoft System, LiveMaker and Gettext .po/.mo — so the same app that translates your Unity game also translates the RPG Maker, Ren’Py, Kirikiri, Wolf RPG, Unreal and Godot titles sitting beside it. Inside Unity it reads TextAssets, MonoBehaviour string fields, StreamingAssets scripts, localization tables and Addressable bundles on both Mono and IL2CPP, and on Mono it also reaches literals compiled into Assembly-CSharp.dll — then writes an exported build that plays with no plugin installed. Around that sit nine translation providers, three of which need no API key at all, plus a local model through Ollama or LM Studio that runs offline and costs nothing per line; a full project editor with find and replace, glossary, cloud translation memory and an optional AI second pass; the Image Studio for Japanese painted into artwork; a save editor; and a live in-game cheat menu. The free tier is the whole product rather than a demo of it: every engine, every provider, the full editor, the save editor, Cheat Mode and the AI refiner are unlocked with no pledge, because free throttles throughput rather than locking features. XUnity.AutoTranslator is Unity-only by design, MIT-licensed and free, and it is the shorter path when you want live text in one Unity game today and are happy installing a mod loader for it.

When you might still reach for XUnity.AutoTranslator

Reach for XUnity.AutoTranslator when the game is Unity, you want to read it tonight, and installing a mod loader per game is fine. Because it hooks text components instead of reading files, it works on a Unity title whose asset containers, encryption or custom serialization nobody has documented — the case where a file-based extractor stalls. It also reaches text that is never stored as text: strings the game composes or formats at runtime, IL2CPP builds with no usable metadata, and the UI of other mods you have installed. It is MIT-licensed, free, needs no account, and supports fully offline endpoints such as Sugoi, local Ollama, LEC Power Translator 15 and ezTrans XP. Its community is large, and for a popular modded title someone may already have published a translation file you can drop in. What it does not do is apply to any engine other than Unity, give you an editing pass before a player sees a line, or leave you with a build.

Why RuneTranslate handles the whole job

RuneTranslate covers the library rather than one engine: the dozen-plus engines outside Unity, and Unity itself. Within Unity it puts the translation in the game rather than in a plugin folder — hand someone the exported build and it is already in their language, with nothing to install and no per-game configuration to repeat. Most of what usually goes wrong is handled for you: it detects the engine, recovers Unreal AES keys, RPG Maker image ciphers and YU-RIS script keys on its own, decrypts and rewrites AES-encrypted Addressable bundles, and refuses to auto-translate the scene names, asset paths, lookup keys and comparison operands that silently break a game — guards that run a second time at export, so an old project cannot push a broken string later. That matters most on Unity, where a translated animator parameter or scene name breaks the game with no error message at all. Before anything ships you get a real editing pass: find and replace, regex filters, a glossary, cloud translation memory that follows your account across PCs, provider routing and an optional AI second pass. It also opens XUnity’s own _AutoGeneratedTranslations.txt as a project source, so the work you have already accumulated by playing can be brought in, edited properly and baked into a build. It runs on Windows; Linux and the Steam Deck run it under Wine or Proton.

Coverage, control and what you keep

Only the axes where these two genuinely differ. Verified August 2026 against the project’s repository and README, and against RuneTranslate 0.53.1.

What you are comparing	RuneTranslate	XUnity.AutoTranslator
How the text is reached	Parses the game’s own data files, extracts every string into a project you edit, and writes them back into a playable exported copy	Loads into the running game and detours Unity’s text-setting methods, substituting each string as it is assigned
Engines it applies to	17 engines and formats — RPG Maker MV/MZ and XP/VX/Ace, Ren’Py, Kirikiri, Wolf RPG, Tyrano, Electron and Cocos shells, Unity, Unreal, Bakin, SRPG Studio, NScripter, Godot, Artemis, YU-RIS, AliceSoft, LiveMaker, .po/.mo	Unity only, Mono and IL2CPP, from pre-5.3 to current. Not applicable to any other engine
Unity text frameworks and sources	TextAssets, MonoBehaviour string fields, StreamingAssets scripts, localization tables, Addressable bundles including AES-encrypted ones, and — on Mono — literals compiled into Assembly-CSharp.dll	UGUI, NGUI, TextMeshPro, TextMesh, FairyGUI, Utage and UIElements; IMGUI and legacy TextMesh ship disabled and must be switched on
Runtime-built strings and other mods’ UI	Everything the game stores is extracted, DLL literals on Mono included; a string the game composes at runtime exists only in memory, so it is not	Yes — concatenated text, text from other mods and IMGUI all pass through the hook
IL2CPP builds	Supported — type information is reconstructed so MonoBehaviour fields extract on IL2CPP as well as Mono; best-effort, and it needs a parseable global-metadata.dat	Supported, but the maintainers describe it as by no means complete — missed hooks needing a manual refresh, no IMGUI, no plugin-specific translations
Unknown, custom or encrypted asset containers	Reads a great many of them — around 26 Kirikiri XP3 encryption schemes, AES-encrypted Unreal paks with the key recovered automatically, AES-encrypted Unity Addressables; a container it cannot open is named in the report and left byte-identical	Irrelevant to it — it only has to recognise a text component, so a Unity game with an undocumented asset format still works on day one
What you are left holding	A playable build you keep — a translated copy of the game you already own, launched normally, with nothing running beside it and nothing for the next person to install	A mod loader, the plugin DLLs and _AutoGeneratedTranslations.txt in the game folder. The txt is yours to keep and share; there is no standalone build
While you are playing	Nothing runs alongside the game; every line was translated, reviewed and baked in before you launched	One request at a time, with a wait for the text to settle before queueing — so first sight of a line can show pop-in or a pause
Limits during a session	No cap of that kind; a run is bounded by your provider and by how long you leave it going	Lines over 200 characters are ignored by default, 8,000 requests per session, plus several self-shutdown safeties that can stop translation mid-play
Reviewing before the player reads it	Full project editor before export — find and replace, regex filters, a glossary, cloud translation memory, provider routing and an optional AI second pass	Each line is translated in isolation as it appears; post-editing is reactive — edit the txt and press ALT+R to reload
Its own translation file	Opens BepInEx/Translation/<lang>/Text/_AutoGeneratedTranslations.txt as a project source, editing values only and never re-encoding the keys, so the plugin still finds every entry	Writes and owns that file; it is hot-reloadable in game and explicitly redistributable under MIT
Non-Latin target languages in Unity	Injects a fallback font into the exported build for you	Frequently needs a TextMeshPro font asset bundle built in the same Unity Editor version as the game — there is a wiki guide for it
Japanese painted into artwork	Image Studio detects the text, inpaints the plate, typesets the replacement and bakes it back in — RPG Maker including encrypted images, Kirikiri, NScripter, Ren’Py, Electron shells and loose image folders; not Unity bundles	Texture replacement by hash-matched filename — you dump the texture, edit it yourself, drop it back. No OCR, no assisted typesetting
Cost and sign-in	Free unlocks every engine, every provider, the whole editor, the save editor, Cheat Mode and the AI refiner, and throttles throughput only; sign-in is a free Patreon account. Supporter $3.99/mo, Pro $5.99/mo	MIT, free, no account, no login. Endpoint cost is whatever you pick — unauthenticated scrapers and fully offline options are both free

RuneTranslate is not affiliated with XUnity.AutoTranslator, which is an independent MIT-licensed project by its own authors and maintainers. The details above were verified in August 2026 against the project’s own repository and README, and against RuneTranslate 0.53.1; both ship updates, so check the current sources before relying on any single line.

Questions people actually ask

What is the best XUnity.AutoTranslator alternative?

RuneTranslate, if you want one app that covers the whole library: 17 engines and formats including RPG Maker, Ren’Py, Kirikiri, Wolf RPG, Unreal, Godot and LiveMaker as well as Unity on both Mono and IL2CPP, nine translation providers with three that need no API key, a full editor with glossary and translation memory, and a playable exported build at the end that runs with no mod loader installed. XUnity.AutoTranslator does not apply outside Unity at all, so for every other engine the choice is already made. If what you specifically want is live on-screen text inside a running Unity game with no export step, that is the one category where the plugin is the stronger tool.

Does RuneTranslate work on Unity games like XUnity.AutoTranslator does?

RuneTranslate supports Unity on both the Mono and IL2CPP runtimes, reaching the text through the game’s own files: TextAsset payloads, MonoBehaviour string fields, StreamingAssets script files, localization tables, Addressable bundles including AES-encrypted ones, and, on Mono builds, string literals compiled into Assembly-CSharp.dll. It also knows which Unity strings must never be translated — scene names, animator parameters, asset paths, UnityEvent method names and lookup keys — and marks them for opt-in instead of rewriting them, which is the difference between a translated game and one that hangs on a loading screen. Because the extraction is static, text the game only builds at runtime is out of reach; XUnity.AutoTranslator sees that because it intercepts the string as it reaches the text component.

Can I keep the translation file I already built with XUnity.AutoTranslator?

Yes. RuneTranslate can open a game’s BepInEx Translation folder and read _AutoGeneratedTranslations.txt as a project source, using a codec transcribed from the plugin’s own TextHelper. It edits values only and never re-encodes the lookup keys, so the plugin still finds every entry, and comments and directives in the file are preserved. That gives you a project editor, translation memory and a glossary over a file you have already accumulated line by line, with the translated copy written out on export.

Why does XUnity.AutoTranslator leave some long lines untranslated?

The plugin caps how long a single string may be before it will send it. MaxCharactersPerTranslation defaults to 200 characters and anything longer is ignored rather than translated, with 1000 as the ceiling and 400 the recommended limit for shared configurations. Long visual-novel paragraphs are the usual casualty, and because the line simply appears untranslated there is nothing obviously broken to point at. Raising the setting is the fix. RuneTranslate has no equivalent limit: it translates whole scripts before you launch, so nothing is being squeezed into a frame budget, and long paragraphs are batched like any other line.

Do I end up with a translated copy of the game with XUnity.AutoTranslator?

RuneTranslate produces exactly that — a translated copy of the game you already own, which launches on its own with nothing injected and nothing for the next person to install. XUnity.AutoTranslator does not, by design: it translates in memory each session, so playing always requires the mod loader, the plugin DLLs and the translation file to be present in the game folder. That translation file is a real artifact you keep and may share under MIT, and RuneTranslate can read it as a project source if you want to turn one into the other.

Is RuneTranslate free, and do I need an account?

Free RuneTranslate is the whole product: all 17 engines, all nine providers, the full editor, the save editor, Cheat Mode and the AI refiner, with no pledge. What free limits is throughput — roughly half speed on AI providers, one project at a time, and the Image Studio read-only. Signing in with a free Patreon account takes a click on first launch. Supporter is $3.99 a month and Pro is $5.99 a month. XUnity.AutoTranslator is MIT-licensed and free with no account and no paid tier; its cost is whatever translation endpoint you choose, and several of those are free or fully offline.

Try it on your game

Free is a speed limit rather than a feature limit — every engine, every provider, the whole editor, the save editor, Cheat Mode and the AI refiner are open on it, with a free Patreon sign-in. Download it, point it at your game folder, and see how much of the script it pulls out before you decide anything. If the plugin is already working for you on one Unity game, keep it: the two are not mutually exclusive.

Download for Windows Get Supporter ($3.99/mo)