Babelith comes to Unreal Engine (still in testing)
Babelith already did live translation, while you play, in Ren'Py, RPG Maker, Unity and TyranoScript. Now it's Unreal Engine's turn.
It ships in 0.99.78, which isn't out yet (the latest public build is 0.99.71), and I don't have a date. I'm telling you now anyway, rough edges included.
An Unreal game has no scripts to touch. Everything is packed inside .pak files, so you can't pre-translate it the way you would a Ren'Py game. Babelith gets in through UE4SS, the injector almost everyone modding Unreal relies on. It's open source (MIT licence), about 9 MB, and it comes bundled with the app, which installs it next to the game.
It works with Unreal 4 and 5 games packaged for Windows: if the executable ends in -Win64-Shipping.exe, it's a candidate.
The mod reads the text on screen and hands it to a translator running outside the game. If the app is open, the app does the translating. If it isn't, the game starts a hidden one by itself. That translator works in batches, with the usual engines (Google, Bing...), so it doesn't run into Google's limits.
The game never waits for it: the first time a line appears you'll see the original for about half a second, then it switches. Everything goes into a per-language cache, so the second time it shows up already translated.
It translates what the game shows in its text boxes (menus, buttons, dialogue, descriptions), plus Unreal's own voice subtitles, which the mod writes into the sound file itself before it plays. Quit, Save, Load, Settings and friends go through a per-language glossary, because Google kept getting them wrong.
In text that changes on its own (stats, dates, money) the numbers stay exactly as the game writes them. I deliberately leave alone the counters the game updates by itself, like money or health, so they don't freeze.
If the game ships with EasyAntiCheat or BattlEye, the app warns you and asks for confirmation before installing. Don't use it in online games.
How to use it
Unreal tab in the app, just below Unity.
Pick the game: its .exe or the folder.
"Install Babelith MOD".
Launch the game as usual, with or without the app open.
Inside the game, Shift+B opens the usual Babelith panel, which shows whether the translator is connected, the engine, the language and how many lines it has done.
The other keys only work with the panel open: Shift+L changes the language, Shift+M the engine, Shift+P pauses (and puts the game back to its original text, so you can compare), Shift+V makes a dump for diagnostics, and Shift+T starts the pre-scan, which is experimental and translates in advance text the game has already loaded but not shown yet.
The panel has to be open because Shift is sprint in almost every Unreal game, and the shortcuts kept firing mid-game.
Uninstalling from the app leaves the game as it was.
Why it's still in testing
I've tried it on four games, from Unreal 4.24 to 5.8. For an engine this varied, that's not much.
A 4.24 game crashed three times in a row because of the way the mod searched for text, and I had to replace that whole system. Before letting it out I did a thorough audit and fixed over a hundred bugs. Even so, there will be games where it doesn't work, or only half works.
Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Hindi and other scripts come out as boxes, because the games' fonts don't have those characters (the app warns you if you pick one of those languages). In Turkish, Polish, Ukrainian or Vietnamese the odd letter may be missing, depending on the game's font.
The in-game panel is Spanish only, by the way. I haven't tried the pre-scan on a real game yet. And some antivirus programs quarantine dwmapi.dll or UE4SS.dll: if that happens, the Unreal tab spots it and tells you.
If you try it
Once it's out, try it on your Unreal games. If something breaks, send me:
The name of the game.
babelith.log and puente.log, from the mod folder: ...\Binaries\Win64\ue4ss\Mods\BabelithUE
If a specific line isn't getting translated, the volcado.txt (Shift+V with the panel open).
Without the logs I'm working blind.
The quota doesn't change: on the free tier, Babelith is 3 games a week across all engines, Unreal included, and reinstalling on the same game doesn't count. Paid tiers stay unlimited.
Thanks for being the guinea pigs again. 🧡