This update is built around one theme: getting your translation on screen sooner. The rest comes straight from your feedback — Chinese quality first, two more Ollama failure modes, and a manga player's detailed report. Thank you for all of it.
NEW: Translations now appear as they are ready instead of all at once. On text-heavy screens the first translated line shows up roughly 40 percent sooner — measured against a 919-screenshot benchmark, with up to 45 percent on dense visual-novel scenes — and the overlay updates only what changed instead of redrawing everything. The final picture is exactly the same as before; it just stops making you wait for the slowest line.
FIX: Two hidden speed bugs. The text recognizer used to lock itself into a slow mode for the whole session if the first thing you translated was a small menu — every big screen after that recognized up to twice as slow. It is now warmed up properly at startup, which made recognition up to 39 percent faster in our measurements. And the high-quality background mode now steps down automatically during manual translation too, not only in auto mode, so a single hotkey press no longer stalls for seconds on that setting.
FIX: Chinese quality got a real pass. Japanese to Chinese — and every route that passes through English internally — no longer produces garbage when a word falls outside the first model's vocabulary; that one fix repaired every affected line in our test set, and it helps Korean and Traditional Chinese too. The built-in Chinese glossary also learned 148 more game-UI terms mined from real screenshots, roughly doubling how many on-screen labels get the exact gaming term.
FIX: Two more Ollama failure modes are caught and corrected automatically. Small local models sometimes return Japanese spelled out in Latin letters instead of a translation, or refuse and lecture you about the content instead of translating it. Both are now detected — with zero false alarms across more than 7,000 valid translations — and the affected lines are re-translated by the built-in offline engine.
NEW: Manga mode now understands speech bubbles. Vertical text columns inside one bubble are merged and translated together, and bubbles are ordered right to left, top to bottom — the way manga is read. On the reported ELDEN RING manga page this turned 25 scattered fragments into 14 clean bubbles in the right order. This only affects the manga content mode; regular UI translation is unchanged to the byte.