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While the Steam Deck can already do so much on its own, it amazes me how the community will push it further. A lot of this is done within the Decky Plugin Framework, which injects community-made plugins into Game Mode. These can do a variety of things, like inject lossless scaling frame generation or allow you to easily change the artwork of all of your Steam games. Now, a new plugin is on the horizon, and it's going to make playing foreign games easier.

BALL x PIT Decky Translator Plugin

That's where the Decky Translator plugin comes in. This new plugin, made by cat-in-a-box, will translate whatever is showing on the screen at any given time with the press of a button. It can use one of three different text recognition software (RapidOCR, OCR.Space, and Google Cloud Vision), and use either Google Translate or Google Cloud Translation to translate whatever is showing on the screen. We also have multiple options for output language:

  • English
  • Spanish
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Portuguese
  • Russian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Chinese (Simplified or Traditional)
  • Arabic
  • Dutch
  • Hindi
  • Polish
  • Turkish
  • Ukranian
DeckyTranslator 1 1
DeckyTranslator 2

For the most part, this works really well. I tried it in a couple of games, and it had no issues finding the text on the screen and translating it. With BALL x PIT specifically, it got every text line on the main menu and translated it from German into English. It detected it all with ease, and it was easy to read the translations. We also have some nice options to customize its auto-detection, and if we know the language, we can set the input language manually.

However, it isn't perfect. When setting Warriors Abyss to Japanese, the detection didn't find the main menu text. It would get some of the text on the screen, but not all of it. Even when I set the text detection down to make sure it can detect more text boxes, it still didn't find it.

WarriorsAbyssTranslator

Despite the minor issues, I think it's a great plugin and has some great ideas. I would love to see if it would be possible to do translations in real-time, which could be great for some games that don't support the English language or are released first in Japan (like the Trails series). Still, this is a nice way to translate different languages on the page with ease.

You can download the Decky Translator plugin from their GitHub, and once it's downloaded, you have to either move the downloaded folder into the plugins folder manually or install it via the ZIP in Decky's developer mode. The plugin should hopefully be on the Decky store soon, which will make installing it much easier.

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Noah Kupetsky
A lover of gaming since 4, Noah has grown up with a love and passion for the industry. From there, he started to travel a lot and develop a joy for handheld and PC gaming. When the Steam Deck released, it just all clicked.
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