Real-time OCR-powered game dialog translator for Windows — reads text from any screen region and displays the translation in a draggable overlay above your game.

TÜRKÇE BİLGİLENDİRME README TR.

• 3 translation engines — switch at any time
  • LM Studio — fully local AI, no internet required (resource-intensive)
  • DeepL Free — 500,000 characters/month, high quality
  • Google Translate — unofficial free endpoint, no API key needed
• Smart OCR powered by Tesseract
  • 6 preprocessing modes (auto, light text, dark text, subtitle top-hat, stroke/outline, equalize)
  • Otsu thresholding + median filter + contrast enhancement
  • 2× / 3× / 4× upscaling options
  • PSM mode selection (single block, single line, sparse text, raw line)
  • Automatic best-mode detection (tries all 6 modes, picks highest-confidence result)
• Transparent overlay — floats above the game, color-coded per engine, draggable
• Continuous scan — configurable interval (0.5–15 s), auto-translates when new text is detected
• Similarity threshold — skips re-translation on minor OCR jitter
• LRU translation cache — 200 entries, avoids redundant API calls
• Global hotkeys — work even in fullscreen games (F2 / F3 / F4 + Ctrl+Alt+R/T/G/H)
• Auto-pause — scanning pauses when the target game window loses focus
• Glossary — protect proper nouns and custom terms from being translated
• System tray — minimize to tray, restore with a double-click
• Multi-monitor support
• Config auto-saved to %APPDATA%\SubLens\config.json

Install all at once:

pip install pillow pytesseract PySide6 mss keyboard pywin32

Tesseract language packs — during Tesseract installation, select the languages you need (eng, tur, jpn, kor, etc.). If a pack is missing, the app falls back to eng and logs a warning.

git clone https://github.com/bnsware/SubLens.git
cd SubLens
pip install pillow pytesseract PySide6 mss keyboard pywin32
python sublens.py

1. Run python sublens.py
2. Select a translation engine (Google requires no setup — great for a first try)
3. Choose source and target languages
4. Press F2 to draw a rectangle around the dialog box in your game
5. Press F3 for a one-shot translation, or F4 to start continuous scanning

1. Open LM Studio → load a model → start Local Server (default port: 1234)
2. In SubLens Settings, enter the URL and Model, then click Connect to verify

• ✅ Fully offline, privacy-friendly
• ⚠️ GPU/RAM intensive — may reduce FPS in demanding games

1. Create a free account at deepl.com → get a Free API key
2. Paste the key into SubLens Settings → click Test to check monthly usage

• ✅ Highest translation quality, low resource usage
• ⚠️ 500k character/month limit

• No API key required, works instantly
• ✅ Zero setup
• ⚠️ Unofficial endpoint — Google may rate-limit or block it occasionally

• Scale: try 3× or 4× for small text
• OCR Mode:
  • Auto — selects mode based on background brightness
  • Light text — bright text on dark background
  • Dark text — dark text on light background
  • Subtitle (top-hat) — best for complex/busy backgrounds (water, blurred landscapes, UI elements). Uses local background removal + adaptive thresholding. Great for games like RDR2 or Spider-Man 2.
  • Stroke outline — for outlined/contoured subtitle text
  • Equalize — histogram equalization for highly varied backgrounds
• PSM 6 works well for most dialog boxes; try PSM 7 for single-line subtitles
• Enable Preview processed image to see exactly what Tesseract receives — invaluable for tuning

In Settings → Game Context, you can provide a hint to guide the translation tone:

Example: Wild West, 1899, cowboy dialogue

DeepL and Google ignore this field.

In Settings → Glossary, add one entry per line:

Arthur=Arthur
RedDead
Guarma=Guarma

• term alone — keeps the word as-is (no translation)
• source=target — replaces the source term with target after translation

%APPDATA%\SubLens\config.json — loaded on startup, saved on exit. Safe to edit manually; delete it to reset all settings.

python _build.py

The resulting SubLens.exe is placed in the dist/ folder. Tesseract is bundled inside the executable — no separate installation needed on the target machine.

SubLens/
├── sublens.py        # Main application (PySide6)
├── _build.py         # PyInstaller build script
├── SubLens.spec      # PyInstaller spec file
├── SubLens.ico       # Application icon
├── READMEapp.md      # In-app help document
├── sublens.bat       # Run helper (bat)
└── calistir.bat      # Alternative launcher

This project is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

• Tesseract OCR — UB Mannheim Windows builds
• PySide6 — Qt for Python
• mss — fast screen capture
• DeepL API — high-quality neural translation