Comparison

RuneTranslate vs Textractor

Textractor reads text out of a game while it runs: it injects a hook DLL into the live process, patches the text-output functions the engine is about to call, and streams each line into a separate window. RuneTranslate never attaches to a running game — it opens the game's own data files, extracts the script into a project you can edit, and writes the finished translation back as a playable build. That single structural difference decides nearly everything else: which engines each tool reaches, how much context the translator gets per line, and whether anything at all survives once you close the game.

Made by: Artikash
Licence: GPL-3.0
Runs on: Windows 7+

The short version

If you want to be reading Japanese text in the next two minutes, Textractor is faster than any file-based tool can be, and on obscure or one-off visual-novel engines it works where RuneTranslate has no adapter at all. If you want the game itself to be in your language — menus, UI, second playthroughs, no window floating over the art — you need a tool that writes to the files, and that is what RuneTranslate does. One maintenance fact belongs in the decision: Textractor's last release was 2022-01-31 and its last commit 2023-08-26, so newer titles increasingly fail to hook. Neither tool is a drop-in replacement for the other; they sit at opposite ends of the same problem.

When Textractor is the better choice

Hooking reads a string after the engine has already decrypted and decompressed it into memory, so Textractor needs no knowledge of the file format at all — it works on one-off doujin engines, on games whose archives no one has documented, and on titles where a file-level tool would need weeks of format work before it showed you a single line. It is the direct descendant of AGTH and ITH and is strongest exactly where that lineage grew up: Kirikiri/KAG, BGI/Ethornell, Majiro, SiglusEngine, RealLive, CatSystem2 and Artemis, with an automatic hook search plus manual /H and /R codes for when the search misses. It is GPL-3.0, free, needs no account, and takes you from launching a game to reading a line in about a minute, which makes it the right tool for sampling a title before committing to translating it, or for reading one menu right now. It also reaches strings that exist nowhere in the files — text assembled by script at display time — which no extractor can ever see. Two things are worth knowing before you start: upstream is unmaintained in practice (last release 2022-01-31, last commit 2023-08-26, 635 open issues), and if a modern game refuses to hook, the actively maintained project in the same family is LunaTranslator, which its author proposed inside Textractor's own issue tracker and which adds offline OCR, clipboard capture, emulator hooks, LLM and offline translation backends, and Anki and Yomitan integration for study.

When RuneTranslate fits better

RuneTranslate is for the case where you want the game translated rather than narrated beside it. It parses 17 engines and formats — RPG Maker MV/MZ and XP/VX/VX Ace, Ren'Py, Kirikiri/KAG, Wolf RPG, TyranoBuilder, Electron and Cocos Creator shells, Unity on Mono and IL2CPP, Unreal Engine 4/5, Bakin, SRPG Studio, NScripter/ONScripter, Godot, Artemis, YU-RIS, AliceSoft System, LiveMaker and Gettext catalogs — pulls every translatable string into an editable project, and exports a playable build you keep. Because the whole script is on the table at once, lines go to the provider in batches with their neighbours rather than one at a time, and a glossary, translation memory and an optional AI second pass hold character names and terminology steady across a fifty-hour script. It is also the only side of this comparison that can change the Japanese painted into title screens and menu buttons, through the Image Studio. The costs are real and worth stating plainly: it is Windows-only, it requires a Patreon account and sign-in even on the free tier, an engine that is not on the list is simply not supported, and several of the newer adapters are best-effort rather than confirmed playable end to end.

Hooking a live game vs rebuilding it

The axes these two genuinely differ on. Textractor details were verified in August 2026 against its own repository and release history.

What you are comparing	RuneTranslate	Textractor
Approach	Reads the game's own data files, writes the translations back, and exports a copy you play.	Injects texthook.dll into the running game, patches its text-output calls, and pipes each intercepted line to a separate window.
What you have when you close the game	A standalone translated build on disk that you keep and replay.	Nothing — the overlay is per-session, and no game file is ever modified.
What limits coverage	A finite list of 17 engines and formats; anything not on the list is unsupported.	Only whether a hook can be found — the string is read after the engine has already decrypted it, so obscure and archive-packed engines work.
Classic Windows visual-novel engines	Kirikiri/KAG, Artemis, YU-RIS, AliceSoft System, NScripter/ONScripter and LiveMaker have adapters; BGI, Majiro, SiglusEngine and RealLive do not.	Its home ground: Kirikiri/KAG, BGI/Ethornell, Majiro, SiglusEngine, RealLive, CatSystem2 and Artemis, plus AGTH-style /H hook codes.
RPG Maker MV/MZ	Full support, including games whose images are stored encrypted, with in-game line wrapping applied on export.	Long-standing open issues (#889, #389, #614, #587) — the text is drawn to a Chromium canvas; the common community workaround is swapping the game's NW.js runtime.
Unity, Unreal and Godot	Unity on Mono and IL2CPP, Unreal 4/5 .locres, Godot 3.x and 4.x — best-effort on some titles, with a playable baseline recorded per engine.	Weak: Unity issues #303 and #1086 report duplicate hooks and truncated phrases and are unanswered; Unreal and Godot are poor hook targets.
Time from launching the game to the first translated line	Longer — create a project, extract the script, run a translation pass, then export before you play.	About a minute: attach, pick a hook thread, read. There is no extraction or export step at all.
What the translator sees	Batches of lines with their surrounding script, plus a glossary and translation memory.	One string at a time, as the engine draws it, usually with no speaker and no surrounding context.
Fixing a line you do not like	Edit it in the project, or use find and replace and regex filters, then re-export — the fix is permanent.	No project file and no script view; a line is translated once, shown once, and gone.
Japanese baked into artwork	The Image Studio detects, inpaints, typesets and bakes it into the exported build; free accounts can open and read it but not change it.	Out of reach — hooking reads engine text, not pixels, and nothing in this family can alter artwork.
Translation backends	9 providers: Google, the DeepL free endpoint and DeepL Classic/Next-gen with no key at all, plus DeepL API, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and a local model via Ollama or LM Studio.	Bundled extensions for Bing (the default), Google and DeepL including free-tier keys, plus Systran and Papago driven through Chrome DevTools. No first-party LLM support — requested in issue #1004, never shipped — although community extensions add it.
Playing through a second time	The build is already translated; cloud translation memory on Supporter and above also reuses lines across projects and PCs.	Every session re-hooks and re-translates, so lines you already spent API calls on are paid for again.
Price and sign-in	The free tier is a speed throttle rather than a feature lock, but it needs a Patreon account and sign-in; Supporter is $3/month and Pro $5/month.	Free, GPL-3.0, no account and no paid tier. The only cost is your own translation API key if you pick a paid backend.
Project activity	Actively developed; 0.53.1 is current.	Last release 2022-01-31, last commit 2023-08-26, 635 open issues. The repository is not archived but is unmaintained in practice.

RuneTranslate is not affiliated with Textractor, which is an independent GPL-3.0 project by Akash Mozumdar. Every detail above was verified in August 2026 against the project's own repository and release history; because upstream is unmaintained, check there before relying on any of it.

Common questions about Textractor

Is Textractor still maintained?

Textractor's last release, v5.2.0, was published on 2022-01-31, its last commit landed on 2023-08-26, and 635 issues remain open. The repository has not been archived and the tool still works on the classic visual-novel engines it was built for, but engine-support requests go unanswered and newer games increasingly fail to hook. A small semi-active community fork exists, and LunaTranslator is the project in the same lineage that is currently maintained.

Can Textractor translate RPG Maker MV or MZ games?

Not reliably. RPG Maker MV and MZ draw their text to a Chromium canvas inside NW.js instead of through the Windows text-output calls Textractor patches, and the issue tracker carries several unresolved reports about exactly this (#889, #389, #614, #587). The standing community workaround is to swap the game's NW.js runtime for a newer build, which is fiddly and varies per game. RuneTranslate takes the other route on these titles and edits the JSON data files directly.

Does RuneTranslate hook into a running game the way Textractor does?

No. RuneTranslate never attaches to a live process — it opens the game's data files, extracts the translatable strings into a project, and writes the finished translation back into a copy of the game that you then play. Nothing is injected and nothing runs alongside the game, and the translated text appears in the game's own text boxes because it is in the game's own files.

Why does antivirus software sometimes flag Textractor?

Textractor works by injecting a DLL into another process, which is the same technique some malware uses, so Windows Defender and other engines have flagged its builds heuristically. Those reports are false positives on an open-source GPL-3.0 tool rather than evidence of anything malicious, but they are a real friction point. Injecting into a game that ships anti-cheat or aggressive DRM is a separate concern and may simply be refused.

What is the closest actively maintained alternative to Textractor?

Within the same hooking family, LunaTranslator is the successor — its author proposed it inside Textractor's own issue tracker, it shipped a release on 2026-08-17, and it adds built-in offline OCR, clipboard capture, emulator hooks for NS, PSP, PSV and PS2, LLM and fully offline translation backends, and Anki and Yomitan integration, while keeping compatibility with Textractor plugins. Its documentation and community are primarily Chinese with translated English pages, which is a genuine onboarding barrier for English-speaking users even though the interface is localized. If instead you want a translated build rather than a live overlay, a file-level tool such as RuneTranslate is the different answer to the same question.

Can I use Textractor and RuneTranslate on the same game?

Yes, and the combination is a sensible one. Hooking is a good way to sample a game and decide whether its script is worth a full translation pass, and it remains the fallback for any engine outside the 17 that RuneTranslate parses. When the engine is supported, running the extraction and exporting a build means you stop needing an overlay for that game at all.

Try it on your own copy

The free tier unlocks every engine, every provider and the whole editor — it simply runs roughly 2× slower on AI providers and keeps one project open at a time. It is Windows-only and needs a Patreon sign-in. What you export is a translated copy of a game you already have, and it stays on your machine.

Download for Windows Get Supporter ($3/mo)