Now machine translation can translate emulated games while you're playing them

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Time to play some more obscure Japanese games.

It's a good time for emulation, with all kinds of new projects out there as well as existing ones coming on by leaps and bounds. Here's one of the most impressive things we've seen in a while: Automatic machine translation between Japanese and English at the press of a button.

This is a new feature of RetroArch, which is a front-end for other emulators, added in version 1.7.8. As you can see in the video of the 1990 Super Nintendo god game ActRaiser above, the text-to-speech function reads aloud all of the tutorial text, with a slight delay as it's translated. Later in the video a second mode is shown which pauses the game while displaying translated text directly over the original. In both cases the functionality is controlled with a remappable key.

Here's how to get it running if you want to try it yourself. RetroArch is still planning to release on Steam this year, by the way.

Thanks, Kotaku.

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.