Translating turn-based RPGs and menu-heavy games — how to handle proper nouns

Turn-based RPGs and games built around combat and menus are a genre where screen OCR plus a translation tool works reliably.

The reason is simple: combat pauses, and menus pause. Turn waits, command selection, status checks, gear changes, talking to townspeople — all of these are conditions OCR is happy with.

The thing that pays off most: glossary

Turn-based RPGs are basically piles of proper nouns. Gear names, skill names, classes, races, place names, character names, status ailments. A single game might have hundreds, sometimes thousands.

Generic AI translation will give you “something that reads okay” for these, but it doesn’t match series-traditional translations and changes from one encounter to the next. That inconsistency is what breaks the experience.

This is where Playto’s Glossary feature earns its keep. Per-game rules — “this word always translates to that word” — can be registered upfront, so gear and skill names that appear during combat read consistently across the whole playthrough.

A useful habit when starting a JRPG is to drop 10–20 visible proper nouns into Glossary before leaving the first town. After that, adding things as they come up keeps the middle and late game much smoother.

Settings that work

A combination that holds up well across this genre.

Cursor Follow as the main mode. In menu and equipment screens, usually only the text near the cursor needs to be translated — just the gear description, just the skill effect. Cursor Follow is good at that pinpoint reading.

Fixed Region for conversation scenes. Talking to townspeople and event scenes have stable subtitle positions, so switching to Fixed Region for those works better. Playto lets you switch between presets, so keeping one for combat/menus and one for towns is convenient.

Grow the glossary early. A few hours of registering proper nouns in the early game pays off through the rest of the playthrough. Skip it entirely and the translation drifts on every encounter, which costs the experience.

Cases that don’t work as well

Even within turn-based RPGs, accuracy can drop.

Fast-scrolling battle logs. Auto-battle and fast-forward modes scroll combat text faster than OCR can keep up. This is a limit to accept.

Extremely short gear names. Single-letter names like “Sword A” don’t have enough context to translate well. Glossary helps here.

Signs and notes on the field. Text out in the world doesn’t have a fixed position, so Cursor Follow has to be pointed at it manually.

Notes on the genre

For language input, turn-based RPGs cover a wide vocabulary range — combat words, daily-life words, geography, story-specific terms. One playthrough exposes the player to a lot. A solid use case is picking a single long game to stick with and playing it slowly.

It’s not a fast genre, so it suits players who can spend a little time on it daily.