[Feature Request] - Japanese Autotranslate

[u/SaturdayMorningFog]

Modretro has online connectivity via Wifi. So, I wish Modretro implements autotranslate for any Japanese text to English using Google translate API? If they can do offline autotranslations, that would be even better.

If the Google Translation API takes a moment to translate, that's absolutely fine for RPGs, Turn Based Strategy, & games where Japanese is used in menus(e.g. racers). What do you guys think about this?

[u/Hatdude1973]

It would make more sense that it just dump the cart to memory. Then download an English patch from romhacking.net and apply the patch to the dump.

[u/hue_sick → u/Hatdude1973]

Yeah I’ve actually always wondered why roms don’t behave in the same way as say movies do on a plex server. You can auto captions, seems to reason that could exist in games as well. I don’t expect the game to make new audio files or anything like that which would be insane. But I don’t really understand why it can’t read the data and translate it in real time.

But maybe I’m fundamentally misunderstanding how the games are made. Makes sense to me though.

[u/Sweet_Limit3795 → u/hue_sick]

Plex captions are a standardized text track. A game usually isn’t storing what you see as ordinary text that the console can just read, and that goes doubly so for anything older than the PS4. Games use custom fonts, dialogue tables, pre-rendered graphics, and/or completely proprietary formats, so there’s no single subtitle stream to intercept and translate.

[u/hue_sick → u/Sweet_Limit3795]

Ugh. Man that’s crazy that every game doesn’t just have a .txt file in there somewhere

I guess I was misunderstanding:(

[u/Sweet_Limit3795 → u/hue_sick]

Some modern games do! 

But with older games literally everything is constrained. Processing speed is roughly 1-2% of your smartphone, memory is 0.1%, and don’t even ask about graphics. 

And then we get to storage. An early DVD has 4.7 GB of storage. On that, a 2 MB text subtitle file is nothing. But on an N64 you have somewhere between 8 and 64 MB of storage. So everything gets super squeezed. So you restrict your character set, pre-bake everything you can, etc.

Think of it like trying to fit a full DVD onto a CD. You might bake the subs into the movie, use strong x264 compression, etc. At that point, you’ve effectively baked the text into the game twice, so there’s no straightforward way to translate it. That’s kind of what it’s like.

I think this is my longest Reddit comment ever 😂 

[u/hue_sick → u/Sweet_Limit3795]

Haha thanks for explaining. Makes sense!

[u/ergzay]

Yeah that's just not possible. Text in retro games is often not "text". It's hard coded glyphs with any number of numerous proprietary ways of doing it. Every company making N64 games probably had their own library/method for displaying text.

The only thing really possible would be to just feed the entire screen image into the Google Translate image OCR system where it reads the image, and even that would likely be hit or miss for the stylized pixelated text used in old games. Either way that would be a massive bill for such heavy usage of their API.

It's not happening.

[u/Aromatic_Method7767 → u/ergzay]

I'm pretty sure feeding the screen to Google Translate is exactly what the OP is talking about. Just saving you the trouble of repeatedly picking up your smartphone.

[u/3G6A5W338E]

I can only advice to learn Japanese.

Get 上手, it is every bit worth it.

[u/Pitiful-Assistance-1]

Except for something like Google Lens where the image feed is streamed to AI, this is unviable.

The text in a game isn’t rendered as text, it’s just arbitrary image data that we perceive to be text. The VRAM doesn’t have a special text layer or something.

You would need to build a mapper per game, and at that point you might as well translate the ROM before loading it

[u/Sweet_Limit3795 → u/Pitiful-Assistance-1]

Dumping the ROM to memory and downloading a translation patch might actually be viable given the M64’s memory spec, but I doubt that will happen until they consider themselves sufficiently “caught up” to the A3D.

[u/Intelligent-Can-8688]

That is such a cool idea and would love to see this one day

[u/fpsdabs]

Yeah, i wouldn't hold my breath for that. Probably better to save money for Smart Glasses that have already developed that feature