Comparison

RuneTranslate vs Translumo

Translumo captures a rectangle of your screen, runs OCR on the pixels locally, sends the recognized text to an online translator and paints the result in a floating window. RuneTranslate never looks at the screen — it parses the game's own data files, extracts the translatable strings into an editable project, and writes them back to produce a playable translated build. That one difference decides almost everything else: what games each can reach, how accurate the source text is, and whether you have anything left when you close the tool.

Made by: ramjke (created by Danily07)
Licence: Apache-2.0
Runs on: Windows 10 2004+

Short answer

If the game has no extractor — a custom engine, an emulator, a protected build — Translumo is not merely an option, it is the approach that can actually reach the text, and it costs nothing and asks for no account. If the game is RPG Maker, Ren'Py, Kirikiri, Wolf RPG, Unity, Unreal or one of the other engines RuneTranslate parses, extraction gives you the exact original strings, an editor, a glossary and an LLM pass, and leaves you with a translated build rather than a session. Translumo is also the sounder choice for anything online or anti-cheat-protected, since it never writes to the game folder. Neither replaces the other; the deciding question is whether your game's file format can be read, and whether you want the translation to still exist tomorrow.

When Translumo is the better choice

Translumo is the right tool whenever the game itself is out of reach. Because it reads pixels, it does not care what engine you are running — custom in-house engines nobody has written an extractor for, console emulators, protected builds, subtitles burned into a video, or ordinary desktop software all work identically, and that is a class of coverage no finite list of adapters can match. It is also the lower-effort path by a wide margin: unzip it, draw a rectangle, press Alt+Q, and you are reading, with no project, no extraction pass and no export. It is genuinely free under Apache-2.0 with no account, no signup and no API key, so anyone can audit or fork it, and roughly 620,000 downloads suggest a lot of people have found that bargain worth taking. It never writes to the game folder, which makes it the safer choice for online titles, anti-cheat-protected games, or any install you would rather not modify at all. Its multi-OCR ensemble with a trained scorer is real engineering rather than a checkbox, and the Windows and Silero text-to-speech output reads translations aloud — an accessibility feature a file-extraction tool has no equivalent for.

When RuneTranslate fits better

RuneTranslate makes sense when the game is one of the 17 supported engines and you care about the result more than the setup time. Reading strings out of the files means the source text is exact — no OCR misreads on stylized fonts, no gap on vertical Japanese, and nothing missed because it rendered outside a rectangle. Because the strings sit in a project you can edit, an LLM provider, a glossary and a translation memory that follows your account across PCs can keep names and terminology consistent across a whole game, and the AI refiner can take a second pass over lines that read badly. The output is a playable build you keep, so you can proofread once, finish the game months later, and never have an overlay running while you play. The honest cost is that setup is longer, a Patreon sign-in is required even on the free tier, it is Windows-only, and only some engines have a confirmed in-game-playable baseline while others are best-effort.

Side by side

The axes on which a screen-OCR overlay and a file-level extractor genuinely differ. Verified against Translumo's repository in August 2026; both projects ship updates.

What you are comparing	RuneTranslate	Translumo
How it reaches the text	Parses the game's own data files and extracts the translatable strings into a project.	Captures a screen rectangle and runs OCR on the pixels locally, then sends the text to an online translator.
What you have when you close it	A playable translated build you keep, replay and back up — no tool needs to be running.	Nothing is saved. Every session re-recognizes and re-translates from scratch.
Which games it can reach	17 engines and formats — RPG Maker MV/MZ and XP/VX/Ace, Ren'Py, Kirikiri/KAG, Wolf RPG, Unity, Unreal 4/5, Godot, and others. A game outside that list is not supported.	Any game or application that renders text on screen, including custom in-house engines, emulators, protected builds and even video subtitles.
Fidelity of the source text	Reads the exact original string out of the file, so nothing is guessed.	OCR, with an ensemble of Windows OCR, Tesseract and EasyOCR scored by an ML model. Stylized fonts, low contrast, animated backgrounds and dense kanji still degrade it, and a misread character produces a wrong translation silently.
Vertical Japanese (tategaki)	Layout is irrelevant — the string comes from the file, not the screen.	Not recognized. An open issue on the tracker since November 2023.
Source languages it can read	Whatever the files contain; there is no recognition step to limit it.	Five recognition languages: English, Russian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Korean. Traditional Chinese is not among them.
Translation services	Nine providers — Google, DeepL's free endpoint and DeepL Classic/Next-gen need no key; plus the DeepL API, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and a local model via Ollama or LM Studio.	Four, all free online web services with no API-key option: DeepL's web backend, Google Translate, Yandex Translate and Naver Papago.
LLM translation	Yes — OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, OpenAI-compatible or local models, plus an optional AI second pass that re-reads each line in context.	No LLM provider. Classic sentence-level machine translation only; a community pull request to add an AI translator was still open in June 2026.
Reviewing and correcting lines	Full editor with find and replace, regex filters, a glossary, cloud translation memory shared across your PCs, and provider routing.	There is no editor — a line is recognized, translated and displayed, with nothing to proofread or correct.
Japanese painted into artwork	The Image Studio detects it, inpaints the plate, typesets the replacement and bakes it into the exported build. Supporter and above; the free tier is read-only here.	Read like any other pixels and translated in the overlay, as long as it falls inside the rectangle you drew — no adapter required.
Text outside one area of the screen	Everything the files contain is extracted — dialogue, item names, choices, menus and status text alike.	Only the selected rectangle is watched; text elsewhere is missed until you stop and re-select the region.
Cost while you play	None. The exported build is an ordinary game, so exclusive fullscreen and full frame rate are unaffected.	Continuous capture and OCR use CPU or GPU and add latency to every line. Exclusive fullscreen is unsupported — the game must run borderless or windowed.
When a free endpoint rate-limits you	Switch to a keyed API or a local model; Pro can additionally route the free scrapers through proxies you supply yourself.	No keyed fallback exists. The README advises configuring rotating IPv4 proxies, and open issues from August 2026 report DeepL returning 429 and staying unusable.
Licence, price and install	Closed source. A Patreon sign-in is required even on the free tier, which unlocks every engine and provider but throttles throughput; Supporter $3/month, Pro $5/month. Windows installer.	Apache-2.0 open source — auditable, forkable, commercial-friendly. Completely free with no account and no keys. A portable ZIP of roughly 500 MB on Windows 10 2004 or later.

Translumo is an independent open-source project by Danily07 and its current maintainer ramjke, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by RuneTranslate. Details here were verified in August 2026 against the project's own repository and README, and both tools ship updates — check the current source before relying on any specific point.

Common questions

Is there a Translumo alternative that saves the translation instead of showing an overlay?

That is the structural difference between the two tools. Translumo is a live overlay — it re-OCRs and re-translates the screen every session and writes nothing to disk. RuneTranslate parses the game's own data files, extracts the strings into a project you can edit, and writes them back as a playable translated build you keep and can replay later without any tool running.

Does Translumo translate vertical Japanese text (tategaki)?

Vertical Japanese is not recognized by Translumo — it is an acknowledged open issue that has been on the tracker since November 2023. That matters for visual novels and menus laid out vertically, because the text is simply not read. A file-level extractor sidesteps the problem entirely, since the string is read from the game data and its on-screen layout is irrelevant.

Can Translumo use ChatGPT, Claude or another LLM for translation?

Translumo ships exactly four translation backends — DeepL's free web endpoint, Google Translate, Yandex Translate and Naver Papago — and none of them is an LLM. A community pull request to add an AI translator was still open as of June 2026. RuneTranslate offers OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint and a local model through Ollama or LM Studio, plus an optional AI second pass that re-reads each line.

Will RuneTranslate work on any game, the way Translumo does?

No — and this is the honest limit of the file-parsing approach. RuneTranslate covers 17 engines and formats, and a game built on something outside that list cannot be extracted at all. Translumo reads pixels, so it works on custom in-house engines, emulators, protected builds and even non-game software. If your game has no adapter, an overlay is the approach that can actually reach it.

Is Translumo free, and what does RuneTranslate cost?

Translumo is completely free and open source under Apache-2.0, with no account, no signup and no API key of any kind — its maintainer funds the work through a separate commercial product. RuneTranslate requires a Patreon sign-in even on its free tier, which unlocks every engine and provider but throttles throughput; Supporter is $3/month and Pro is $5/month, with a Developer tier quoted on request.

Does it make sense to use Translumo and RuneTranslate together?

Many people reasonably would. Translumo is the faster answer when you want to read something tonight, when the game's engine has no extractor, or when you would rather not modify the install at all. RuneTranslate is the better investment when the game is one of the 17 supported engines and you want a translation you can proofread, keep consistent with a glossary, and play later without an overlay running.

Try it on a game you already own

Every engine and every provider is unlocked on the free tier, including the three that need no API key — free is a throughput throttle, not a feature paywall, so translation runs roughly 2× slower on AI providers and keeps one project open at a time. It is Windows only, and signing in with a Patreon account is required even on free. Supporter is $3/month for full speed, translation memory, the glossary and provider routing; Pro is $5/month.

Download for Windows Get Supporter ($3/mo)