Translation question

FAST6191

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There are a few emulators that will attempt to OCR (optical character recognition) the characters on screen (or maybe some layers) and send those off to machine translation services to either give a separate readout or even sometimes layer it back.
OCR of most game fonts is tricky, and machine translation is worse, likely never going to be any better*.
Most would probably start with Retroarch there though. You could also chain together a more conventional OCR program with whatever you like, and maybe a ROM hack if it is going to have a translucent text box and thus whatever city/forest/river/... setting your game has and will confuse the OCR program that normally only deals with plain backgrounds.

*choice video on why that might be


On the actually useful front there are also some Lua scripts for those emulators that support that (a lot of them do, http://fceux.com/web/help/LuaScripting.html being the gold standard for most, though you might need to go find the tool assisted speedrunner builds) which will read the game text out of memory (can and does vary from game to game, and even within games), and do things with that (could send it to a machine translation service, could just display it in a large font, can also fire it through a text to speech program). Usually seen more for play by people with eyesight issues but I have seen some stuff used by streaming types too. These will then need custom scripts made for individual games.
 

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