Comparison

RuneTranslate vs XUnity.AutoTranslator

XUnity.AutoTranslator loads into a running Unity game and swaps each string as it reaches the text component. RuneTranslate never runs inside the game: it parses the game’s own data files, pulls the strings into a project you edit, and writes a playable exported copy. That one difference decides almost everything else on this page — what the tool can see, what you end up holding, and which games it applies to at all.

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

The short version

XUnity.AutoTranslator is the better tool for playing a Unity game in another language with the least work, and for reaching text that no file-based tool can see — anything the game builds at runtime, anything compiled into its assemblies, anything in a container nobody has documented. RuneTranslate is the better tool when the game is not Unity at all, when you want a build that plays without a loader installed, or when the translation is a project you intend to review rather than read as it arrives. Neither replaces the other inside Unity, and using both is reasonable: RuneTranslate can open the plugin’s own translation file and hand it back edited. The honest summary is that one optimises for starting in five minutes and the other for controlling the result.

When XUnity.AutoTranslator is the better choice

Use XUnity.AutoTranslator when the game is Unity and you want to start playing today. Because it hooks text components instead of reading files, it works on a Unity title the day it ships — including games whose asset containers, encryption or custom serialization nobody has ever documented, which is precisely where a file-based extractor stalls. It also reaches text no static extractor can structurally see: strings composed or formatted at runtime, strings baked into Assembly-CSharp.dll on builds a decompiler cannot help with, IL2CPP builds with no usable metadata, and the UI of other mods you have installed. The feedback loop is immediate — you read a bad line, edit _AutoGeneratedTranslations.txt, press ALT+R, and it is fixed without an export step. It is MIT-licensed, free, needs no account, and offers genuinely offline endpoints through Sugoi, local Ollama, LEC Power Translator 15 or ezTrans XP, so a player who works through a lot of Japanese Unity games can run at zero marginal cost forever. And the ecosystem is in a different league: thousands of stars, hundreds of thousands of downloads on a single release, Thunderstore packages for the big modded titles, and community-curated translation files for many specific games, so for a popular title the work may already be done and you only have to drop in someone else’s file.

When RuneTranslate fits better

The first reason is simply that the game is not Unity. XUnity.AutoTranslator does nothing for RPG Maker, Ren’Py, Kirikiri, Wolf RPG, Unreal, Godot, LiveMaker or the dozen other engines RuneTranslate parses, so for anything outside Unity the comparison ends there. Within Unity, RuneTranslate suits you when you want the translation to live in the game rather than in a loader — the export is a modified copy of the game you already own, and it launches on its own with nothing injected, which also sidesteps the plugin’s per-session request cap and its default 200-character line limit that quietly skips long visual-novel paragraphs. It suits you when you want to read the script before the player does: everything lands in an editor with a glossary, regex filters, find and replace, cloud translation memory that follows your account across machines, and an optional AI second pass. And it can pick up where the plugin left off, opening an existing _AutoGeneratedTranslations.txt as a project source and editing only its values, so an accumulated translation file gets a proper editor without losing a single lookup key. Be clear-eyed about the trade: it is Windows-only, it requires a Patreon sign-in even on the free tier, and Unity extraction is best-effort — some titles yield a complete script, others yield part of one.

Runtime hook against file extraction

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 data files, extracts strings into a project, writes them back into an 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, and — on Mono — literals inside 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	Out of reach — a string composed or formatted at runtime never exists in a file to extract	Yes, and this is its strongest advantage — concatenated text, text from other mods and IMGUI all pass the hook
IL2CPP builds	Supported on a best-effort basis by reconstructing type information; needs a parseable global-metadata.dat, and DLL literals stay out of scope	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	Needs the container format to be readable; a bundle it cannot open is reported and left untouched	Irrelevant — it only has to recognise a text component, so a game with an unread asset format still works day one
What you are left holding	A playable build you keep — a modified copy of the game you already own, launched normally with nothing injected	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 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	None of this kind; the run is bounded by the 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	Project editor with find and replace, regex filters, a glossary, cloud translation memory 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	Can open BepInEx/Translation/<lang>/Text/_AutoGeneratedTranslations.txt as a project source, editing values only and never re-encoding the keys	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	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, inpaints, typesets and bakes — on RPG Maker, Kirikiri, NScripter, Ren’Py, Electron 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 tier throttles speed, not features, but requires a Patreon account and sign-in. Supporter $3/mo, Pro $5/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?

It depends on why you are looking. If the game is not Unity, XUnity.AutoTranslator does not apply at all and you need an engine-aware tool — RuneTranslate covers 17 engines including RPG Maker, Ren’Py, Kirikiri, Wolf RPG, Unreal, Godot and LiveMaker. If the game is Unity and you want a build that plays without a mod loader installed, RuneTranslate extracts the strings from the game’s own asset files, translates them in an editor, and writes a playable exported copy. If you simply want live translation with less setup, the honest answer is that XUnity.AutoTranslator is already the strongest tool in that category.

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

RuneTranslate supports Unity on both the Mono and IL2CPP runtimes, but it reaches the text a different way: it reads TextAsset payloads, MonoBehaviour string fields, StreamingAssets script files, localization tables and Addressable bundles, and on Mono builds it can also read string literals compiled into Assembly-CSharp.dll. Because the extraction is static, text that only exists once the game has built it at runtime is out of reach, and IL2CPP coverage depends on reconstructing type information from a parseable global-metadata.dat. XUnity.AutoTranslator sees all of 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, 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 redistributed 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; a file-based tool has no equivalent limit because nothing is being translated under a frame budget.

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

No, and that is by design. XUnity.AutoTranslator translates in memory each session, so playing the game always requires the mod loader, the plugin DLLs and the translation file to be present in the game folder. The translation file itself is a real, MIT-blessed artifact you keep and can share, which is a genuinely cleaner story than passing around game files. RuneTranslate takes the other route and writes a modified copy of the game you already own, which launches on its own with nothing injected.

Is XUnity.AutoTranslator free, and is RuneTranslate?

XUnity.AutoTranslator is MIT-licensed and completely free with no account and no paid tier; your only cost is whatever translation endpoint you choose, and several of those are free or fully offline. RuneTranslate requires a Patreon account and sign-in even on its free tier, which is a real friction cost worth weighing. Free RuneTranslate is a throughput throttle rather than a feature paywall — roughly half speed on AI providers and one project open at a time — with Supporter at $3 a month and Pro at $5 a month.

Try it on your game

RuneTranslate is free to use with a Patreon sign-in, and free is a speed limit rather than a feature limit — every engine, every provider and the whole editor are open on it. Download it, point it at your game folder, and see how much of the script it can extract before you decide anything. If the game is Unity and the plugin is already working for you, keep it: the two are not mutually exclusive.

Download for Windows Get Supporter ($3/mo)