Building a tool to translate games in real-time — does this problem resonate with anyone?

August 30, 2026

I play a lot of games that never get official translations, and constantly alt-tabbing to a dictionary or translator kills the immersion completely. So I'm building a small tool to solve that.

It's very early — just a landing page + interactive demo right now, no working product yet. Wanted to share and get honest feedback before I sink more time into it.

Curious if this is a problem for others too, or if I'm overthinking a niche annoyance.

Noxie Labs

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I don't play many games that require translation, but my partner, plays a ton of JRPGs and I always end up Googling things for him! Curious about the technical integration—are you building this as an add-on or a mod? Also, just to suggest an alternative market: could you use this same tech to simply magnify smaller in-game text? It would be amazing for accessibility so players don't have to fuss with clunky OS screen magnifiers. I definitely don't want to add scope to your beta, just throwing the idea out there!

Brendan Grant

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2 days ago
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  Thanks so much for this, really appreciate the detailed feedback! To answer your question, yes, this is an add-on, it sits on top of any game rather than modding a specific one. And the accessibility idea for magnifying small in-game text is genuinely great. That's going into the product, for sure. If you want to stay in the loop, there's a notify option on the site, feel free to sign up there so you hear when it's live.
  
  Noxie Labs
  
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  2 days ago
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The immersion problem is easy to understand. Curious whether players would actually use real-time translation often enough to change their gaming setup, or whether the alt-tab friction is tolerable for most.

Aryan Sinh

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2 days ago
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  Fair point. My idea is it matters most for text-heavy genres (JRPGs, visual novels, story-driven games) where alt-tabbing breaks pacing constantly, vs action games where it's less of an issue.
  There's also a practical friction most people don't think about - in a lot of these games the text isn't selectable, so you can't just copy-paste into a translator, you'd have to manually retype it. That's fine for a short line, but with dense dialogue (or no matching keyboard layout for the language) it quickly becomes unusable. Screenshotting and feeding it into an AI tool works too, but it's not exactly fast either when you're doing it every few lines. That gap is a big part of why I think this needs to be automatic rather than "copy the text yourself."
  Thank you for your feedback!! I appreciate it very much
  
  Noxie Labs
  
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  2 days ago
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    That makes sense. The non-selectable text problem makes the automatic workflow much more compelling than simply replacing an alt-tab with another translation tool.
    
    Aryan Sinh
    
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    2 days ago
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      To clarify - by "alt-tabbing" I meant the full cycle of switching apps, translating, and coming back to the game. That's the friction I want to remove entirely, not just move it to a different tool. On that note - do you have some things you'd love to have in an app like this?
      
      Noxie Labs
      
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      2 days ago
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        The main thing I’d want is reliable OCR across different game fonts and text sizes, with the translation appearing quickly enough that the interruption is genuinely invisible.
        
        Aryan Sinh
        
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        2 days ago
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        That's exactly the bar I'm aiming for - OCR accuracy and latency are the two things that make or break this. If either one is off, it just becomes a worse version of manual translation. Appreciate you spelling it out this clearly.
        
        Noxie Labs
        
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        2 days ago
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        Would you be open to sharing the best email to reach you on? I’d like to continue the conversation beyond the thread.
        
        Aryan Sinh
        
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        2 days ago
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        Sure, happy to continue the conversation, you can reach me at noxielabs@gmail.com.
        
        Noxie Labs
        
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        2 days ago
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        Thanks! I’ve just sent it over. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.
        
        Aryan Sinh
        
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        2 days ago
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        Thanks! I’ve sent it over. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.
        
        Aryan Sinh
        
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        2 days ago
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Great idea, I'm not really a video game fan, nor even a computer science fan, but I'm very interested in real-time translation and how it's done using AI. Especially since you're talking about a video game, I imagine the real-time translation voice would be very realistic, not robotic. I was more interested in the computer science part of real-time translation. What tools do you use? And how do you use them to achieve it?

Davise21

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2 days ago
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  About voice translation — I guess it will happen eventually, but not right now. At this point, it's mostly about specific games like JRPGs and visual novels. As for the tools question: I'm going with Go for the MVP. Just to clarify, this is still an idea at this stage, but if enough people are interested, I'll start building it properly. Thanks for the feedback! What would you personally expect from something like this? If you have thoughts, feel free to share them here or on the site, I'd really appreciate it.
  
  Noxie Labs
  
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  a day ago
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