Translate Warhammer Rules to Czech with NotebookLM (Free)

Maybe you know the feeling. You open a new codex or battletome, read every paragraph two or three times, and after twenty minutes you still don't quite know how that ability or rule actually works. Warhammer is almost entirely in English — rules, lore, FAQs, all of it. Czech, if it ever arrives at all, comes either late or, more often, never. And Google Translate might get you the words, but it doesn't always help — the meaning slips away exactly where you need it most. On top of that, it's pretty slow going. So what's the fix?

Over the past year, though, we've been getting our hands on a tool that solves this differently. It doesn't translate mechanically word by word — it actually understands what you're reading, and can explain it to you comfortably, in Czech, even out loud as a podcast if you like. It's called NotebookLM (Google is slowly rebranding it as Gemini Notebook, but the old name is still sticking around for now), and it's completely free. Let's take a look at how to use it for anything Warhammer-related — from Kill Team to Horus Heresy.

We see it as a solid tool for breaking through the language barrier (and not just that). For example, when parents want to play a few games of tabletop carnage with their kids, they don't have to sweat quite so much over explaining and translating the rules.

Ugh, another AI. Why bother?

Google's NotebookLM (powered by Gemini models) runs on one simple principle: you upload your own materials — a PDF, a document, a photo, a webpage — and it answers purely based on what you've given it. It doesn't make things up from the wider internet the way a typical chatbot does. You ask about a rule, and it answers you based on the specific page (or the entire PDF) of the rulebook you uploaded — and it shows you exactly where it pulled that information from.

This works beautifully for lore, and it matters even more for rules. You don't want an AI vaguely narrating how the combat phase supposedly works — you want an explanation based on the specific book you actually own, one you can double-check afterward against the page it came from.

And here are a few key ways to elegantly put translation and summarizing to use:

A photo of the page instead of racking your brain over a dictionary

This is probably the fastest route. NotebookLM can take a photo directly as a source — it recognizes the text in the image itself and works with it just like normal text. No scanning, no retyping needed. That said, if you own a PDF or other digital format of the rulebook, you're at an advantage, since that's usually the highest-quality source.

Take a photo of a page from a physical rulebook, a unit card, or that mysterious lore paragraph about your favorite faction, upload it as a source, and simply ask, in Czech: "Explain to me in your own words how this ability works" or "What exactly does this paragraph mean?" You'll get an answer in Czech, grounded directly in what you photographed — not in some general knowledge pulled from the internet, which could easily be about a completely different edition of the rules anyway.

An audio overview (podcast) with two hosts breaking down the rules for you

This is the feature that made NotebookLM famous — Audio Overview. You upload your sources (rules, lore, even an entire rulebook), click one button, and the tool generates a listenable discussion between two AI voices talking about the content like a real podcast — summarizing the key points, flagging what matters, and connecting the dots between different sections.

And it works (mostly) in Czech too — just switch the output language in the settings. For anyone learning a new ruleset, it's a completely different experience from slogging through English text: instead of working through paragraph after paragraph, you put on a twenty-minute episode where two "hosts" walk you clearly through the whole game system. And since it's audio, you can just as easily listen to it while painting miniatures.

It's simply another channel for making rules easier to understand or for taking in lore. We tried it ourselves, and in some cases it genuinely helped a lot.

We tried generating audio from the PDF rulebook for Warhammer The Old World. It has its limits for now, but judge for yourself,

An infographic as a quick pre-game cheat sheet

A recent addition to NotebookLM is the ability to generate infographics — visual summaries of the content. Instead of the model dumping paragraphs of text on you, you get a clear, single-page visual with the key points — perfect for printing out or saving to your phone as a quick reference to glance at during a game, without having to flip through the entire rulebook.

For wargaming, this is especially handy for the things you keep forgetting — the order of phases in a turn, an overview of modifiers, or a comparison of abilities within a single faction. You generate an infographic from the rules, print it out, and keep it right next to the game board.

You'll probably need to play around with it a bit and be quite specific about what you want on the card, or which rule you want NotebookLM to focus on. Still, the result can genuinely help. We tried this ourselves too, again using the rules for Warhammer The Old World.

How to actually do it — step by step

It works on... pretty much anything

None of this is tied to a single game — it works just as well for Warhammer 40,000, Age of Sigmar, Kill Team, Necromunda, Horus Heresy, and for older or less widely supported systems that Czech will probably never officially reach. Whenever you run into English (or really, any) text that only gives you a hazy idea of what's going on, just photograph or upload it and have it explained back to you in different words — in a language you actually understand.