i knew this would happen. everything's AI now, so everything must be bad. translation utilities have used machine learning methods for years, long before gpts got useful. translation doesn't have nearly the power requirements of generative stuff. also, for the record, it's not the usage of generative ai that's wasteful, it's building the model. the models are already built.

but anyway, it sounds like you want to run something on your own machine. there are tools for this. some of them are engine-specific, others do video capture. RPG maker and various visual novel engines for example have tons of them, where you just run the game using the tool and it replaces all the text. there are similar things for emulators.

is this something that's desirable, or do you want to use the game more as a language learning guide so that the original text stays up? in that case the OCR path is probably better, using something like translumo or ugt. they will show the text in a separate window.

If you're talking about one of those plugins/mods then the AI translation is occurring locally on your machine. The increase in processing use is you on your machine, not a warehouse.

Try LibreTranslate. It is a "language model," but it is not a "large" language model along the lines of something like ChatGPT. I am not sure what the training process entails, but it will run on a 10 year old dual core CPU without GPU acceleration. You can test it at libretranslate.org, or you can install it on your own machine if you have Python by running pip install libretranslate. I run LibreTranslate on a meager VPS (the CPU I just described) and the headroom left over from running Mastodon is enough to handle the translation queries locally, without making any remote requests.

I'm not sure it's not AI, but DeepL has been around for a while, it's at least older than this modern concept of AI, so I think it's a different model. I like it a lot.

Stuff like DeepL and Google Translate use AI but not LLMs. They use much less power from what I can gather. For example Firefox allows you to perform such translation on your computer without using a cloud service like Google Translate and its still pretty fast.