Planned Release Date: Aug 30, 2026

About This Software

Yakutori is an offline, real-time screen translator for Japanese games, visual novels, and applications. It watches a window you choose, reads the Japanese on screen, translates it to English, and draws the translation right on top of the original - so you can play import titles and untranslated games as if they'd been localized.

Everything runs on your own machine. No cloud services, no accounts, no internet connection at runtime, and no telemetry. The OCR and translation models are bundled with the app and loaded locally — what you translate never leaves your PC.

What it does

• Real-time overlay : translations appear in place over the original text and update as the scene changes.

• Per-window capture : reads a single game window without disturbing the game: no injection, no borders, no focus stealing.

• Made for reading & learning : furigana readings, a built-in Japanese dictionary, and one-click flashcard export.

• Fully offline & private - 100% local, no network required.

How to use it

1. Choose how to capture

• Screen mode : translates the whole game window. Every block of Japanese is detected and its English is drawn in place, right over the original text.

• Area mode : when you only want one region translated (like the dialogue box). Click Configure Area, drag a box over the text once, and Yakutori translates only that region into a clean fixed box — perfect for busy screens or fixed-position text.

2. Start capturing

Pick your window (Screen mode) or area (Area mode) and press Start. The overlay appears over the game. Tune font, size, colors, background opacity, and position to taste and toggle the overlay on/off any time with a global hotkey, even while the game is focused.

3. Single or Duo subtitles

Show just the English (Single), or the original Japanese stacked above the English (Duo) — great if you're studying the language.

4. Create flashcards

See a line worth studying? Press the Create-card hotkey to snapshot the current frame together with its Japanese and translation. Snapshots stack up and survive restarts, so you can grab a batch while you play and build cards later. Open one from the stack, refine the word, reading, and meaning with help from the built-in JMdict dictionary and automatic furigana then export to Anki (.apkg) and review however you like.

Yakutori is a machine-translation tool: it makes Japanese games readable, but automatic OCR and translation aren't perfect and won't match a hand-crafted human localization.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Yakutori uses on-device AI to translate Japanese text on your screen into English in real time. It reads the on-screen text with optical character recognition (PaddleOCR PP-OCRv5) and generates the English translation with a local large language model (Qwen3-4B). All AI runs entirely on your own computer — no cloud services and no internet connection are used, and nothing you translate ever leaves your device. As with any machine translation, the AI-generated output is not always perfect.