How to watch Japanese game streams and playthroughs with English subtitles (free)
Published: 2026-09-16
Japanese game streams and playthroughs are worth watching: commentary on games not yet released in English, speedruns of Japan-only titles, a streamer reacting to a story you know. But there are no English subtitles, and translated clips, if any, arrive days later.
This guide shows how to get English subtitles on a Japanese game stream or playthrough playing in your browser, live or recorded, for free, without installing anything.
What you need
- Chrome or Microsoft Edge on a computer. Safari and Firefox do not work
- Not a phone or tablet. Mobile browsers cannot share tab audio
- The stream open in a browser tab, not in a desktop app
- A one-time download of the speech recognition model. For Japanese, the Balanced setting is about 590MB; after the first time, it is loaded from your browser's storage
No account, no extension, no payment, and no time limit.
How it works
LiveSub is a website. You share one browser tab's audio with it. It recognises the Japanese speech on your own computer, translates it with Chrome's built-in on-device translator, and shows the Japanese and the English as subtitles. Your audio is never uploaded anywhere.
Because it works from sound, it subtitles what you can hear: the streamer, guests, and voiced game dialogue. Text on the screen is not translated: menus, item descriptions and in-game captions stay as they are.
Step by step
1. Set the direction and try the sample
Open https://livesubweb.com/?lang=en in Chrome. Under "Translate from / to", choose Japanese → English. This matters: Japanese uses a different recognition model, and if you leave it on English → Japanese you get garbled text instead of subtitles.
Press "Try a sample". It plays a short built-in Japanese clip and shows subtitles without sharing any tab, and it gets the one-time download out of the way.
2. Choose a recognition setting
Under "Recognition setting", the options for Japanese are:
- Balanced: the recommended starting point. It keeps up with live speech
- Japanese-tuned: a model retrained on Japanese only. It mishears far less, even in fast, casual speech. It needs a powerful GPU, and the first download is about 730MB
- Anime/game voice: Japanese-tuned, further trained on anime and game voices. Worth trying on streams with a lot of shouting and laughter, or when the game's voiced dialogue matters to you. For ordinary speech, Japanese-tuned may be more accurate. Same load as Japanese-tuned; the first download is about 770MB
The two GPU options only appear when your browser can use the GPU, and they are hidden when "Don't use the GPU" is ticked. If your computer cannot keep up with one of them, LiveSub tells you and switches back to Balanced by itself. You can change the setting while the stream is running.
3. Share the stream's tab
Open the stream in another tab. Back in LiveSub, press "Start (share a tab)". In Chrome's sharing dialog:
- Pick the "Chrome Tab" section at the top
- Choose the tab playing the stream
- Tick "Also share tab audio" at the bottom left
- Press Share
If nothing appears, it is almost always the audio checkbox. If no sound arrives for about 12 seconds, LiveSub tells you; press "Share again" and tick it.
4. Watch
Subtitles appear about one to two seconds after the words are spoken. On the first run, they start once the model has finished loading.
Put game terms in the word list
This is the single most useful thing you can do for game streams. Speech recognition is bad at names, and games are made of them: character names, place names, item and skill names, boss names, the game's own title, and the streamer's nickname. Left alone, each of these comes out differently every time it is said.
Open "Word list" and add the correct spellings, one per line. Japanese entries need at least 3 characters, English ones 4. Add each form you expect to hear, for example a full name and the short form. Anything recognition mishears is corrected to your spelling, and it also fixes the hiragana and katakana mix-ups that recognition is prone to.
Reading over a fullscreen stream
Press "Show in a floating window". The subtitles move into a small window that stays on top of everything else, so you can put the stream in fullscreen and still read them. Drag it to an edge where it does not cover the action, and switch the display to "Translation only" if you want it compact. You can scroll back to earlier lines.
If you are playing a game yourself
Speech recognition uses the GPU too. If you are playing on the same computer and your game starts stuttering, tick "Don't use the GPU (if games or video stutter)". Recognition runs on the CPU instead, a little slower, but it stops competing with your game. Japanese-tuned and Anime/game voice are not available in this mode.
Live streams and recorded playthroughs
Live streams: there is no time limit, because nothing runs on a server. A six-hour stream is fine.
Recorded playthroughs: the subtitles follow whatever is playing. Pause, and they pause; rewind, and the line is subtitled again, so you can replay a bit of commentary you missed.
For either, "Download transcript" saves the whole session as a text file with timestamps, the Japanese and the English side by side.
Honest limits
- Loud BGM and sound effects reduce accuracy. Quiet menus and chatting segments come out well; boss fights with music at full volume do not
- The subtitles do not say who is speaking. The streamer's commentary and the game's voiced lines appear in the same stream of text
- Text on screen is not translated. Only the audio is
- Collabs with several people talking at once lose the overlapping parts
- It is machine translation. You get the gist; jokes, slang and wordplay often do not survive
- Names are the weak point even with the word list
- About one to two seconds of delay
- Computer only. It needs Chrome or Edge on a desktop or laptop
Related guides
- For Twitch specifically, including chat and theater mode, see watching Japanese Twitch streams with English subtitles
- For recorded videos in general, see how to get English subtitles on Japanese videos that have no captions
- For VTuber streams, see watching Japanese VTuber streams with English subtitles
Try it
Open the stream or playthrough, then open LiveSub on your computer: