tymmur
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Posts posted by tymmur
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1 hour ago, phantomJS said:
Fuwa may not be a dead forums, but it's a lot less active than similar forums
.....
It's my impression that Fuwa is the most active place when it comes to fan translation projects.
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The answer is simple. You can't post on a dead forum
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27 minutes ago, Dizzy said:
"You should learn the original language or we bash you" or "No Machine TL, No Fan TL, No Official TL, ORIGINAL LANGUAGE or BUST"
Look at the banner, "Make visual novel popular in the west" by what? by forcing people to learn and bash who for whatever reason didn't?That has nothing to do with this thread at all. Nobody said anything like that and nobody thinks like that. Human made translations is a good thing and they are read by everybody here. It's so easy to make other people look bad if you start to make fake quotes, but you will not win any popularity contents by doing so.
The debate here is about VNs with no translation at all. Can they be read using a machine translation or will the reader have to study Japanese in order to read such VNs? I fail to see the claimed "eliteism", which states you have to be able to read Japanese if no translation exist. It's merely stating facts.
If you just want to read VNs, which have English translations (official or fan made), then there is nothing in this thread, which will even remotely affect you.
- Plk_Lesiak and Dreamysyu
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Welcome to Fuwa. It's always nice to see new people who seem to love VNs like the rest of us.
2 hours ago, poptartguy87 said:I first got into visual novels when I read Yume Miru Kusuri and Ever17
I really like those two. In fact I would say YMK is a great VN because it dares to dig deep into some serious problems, which a lot of people prefer not to talk about. Because of this I would imagine the intended reader is somewhat older than the average intended VN reader and possibly aimed more at experienced VN readers. However considering this was your introduction and you are here anyway, I might have to rethink the age group.
2 hours ago, poptartguy87 said:I joined because I thought it wouldn't hurt to have an account ready for whenever I wanted to jump into discussions. I'm shy, so it probably won't happen often, but hey, why not.
Being shy is fine. In fact it can be hard to be a thinker and not shy at the same time, meaning a certain amount of shyness could be a positive trait, at least in some cases. Just make sure you don't go overboard in shyness and end up not posting when you want to post.
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Hello and welcome. It's always nice to see people providing morale support to translation projects.
4 hours ago, Akshay said:Just wondering how Eustia is in your top three as its untranslated and you can't read it?
Smells a bit like a machine translation attempt to me. One thing machine translations are good for is to figure out if something is important enough to get a proper translation, or in this case if you should be hyped about a translation project.
2 hours ago, ManteR said:Actually I don't know if it also happens to you, on particular occasions things can leave a big impression on me, for instance I have been hospitalized 2 times (for minor issues) each for short periods, the 1st time I was bored and read Psyren (my top3 manga), the 2nd time I played Aiyoku no Eustia.
You read VNs and manga at a hospital??? Whenever I have been hospitalized, I have been more concerned with staying alive. I don't think I have ever been hospitalized for minor issues though.
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4 hours ago, Dreamysyu said:
God, seeing people's results makes me wonder what exactly they answered to get these results.
I tried several different variants, and the most fucked up thing I got was... outdoor sex or something.
It's Dergonu. That explains everything. I just went ahead and tried again and intensionally made different choices while staying within myself. That just made it worse. Now "Not sexually involved" increased and "Masturbation" showed up as least likely. However I'm the subject of sexual fantasy. Now is your chance girls. Come and cure my unwanted asexuality.
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On 14/5/2018 at 6:14 PM, BunnyAdvocate said:
I'm so glad you guys have had fun with it~
I did have fun until the results decided to be a bitch and hate me
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5 hours ago, +StrikeR+ said:
Kanji/hiragana is where I'm stuck
I get the kanji part, but hiragana should be strait forward. You already know the idea of characters representing sounds and hiragana is just different characters based on the same system. Find a good hiragana cheat sheet online (yes, they are actually called that for some reason) and print it. Place the paper next to the monitor and then use hiragana furigana. This way you will be forced to look at the cheat sheet whenever you read a hiragana. That way you will force yourself to look at the paper frequently and fairly quickly you will remember some hiragana without looking at the paper and over time you will remember all of them. Combine this with other approaches to study hiragana as you need the theory behind some of them, like what's the difference between か and が. You really should learn how "sound modifiers" work instead of remembering each case they are used in as new characters.
If your hiragana studying consist of going through a list of hiragana trying to remember them all, then you will fail. It's so easy to remember them while you read the list and then forget them by the time you need them and reading the list again will not solve the problem. It's a matter of keeping a constant exposure, preferably daily to prevent yourself from forgetting what you learned during your last studying session.
Language studying not just a question of time spent. 30 minutes a day is more efficient than 4-5 hours once a week. The daily exposure and hence forcing your brain to not forget between studying sessions is quite valuable.
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14 minutes ago, littleshogun said:
So what's your thought about this?
That I'm tired of the hype building approach to announcements. If they have something to tell us, just tell us already. All this "I got a secret to tell you, but I'm not telling it yet" is annoying and not interesting at all. I can't be affected by their hype and look forward to their releases if I'm not even allowed to know what they release.
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Some companies have tried 3D rendering VNs and it is usually not well received. People generally prefer 2D girls to be... well 2D (not to be confused with flat). The benefit for 3D is if it can be real time rendered and the player can control the camera. Illusion soft seems to have some luck in that department, though it's more like nukige if you can even call it VNs. Tea time went for 3D rendered VNs with moving characters and camera. They put a lot of effort into it with custom engine and stuff and they still ended up bankrupt.
It's my impression that the pre-rendered 3D VNs all try to make the characters look photo realistic. Some do a decent job at it, but I don't think it's a goal shared with the readers.
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27 minutes ago, tymmur said:
Same here. If you want to use the software you mentioned, then I won't stop you. My point is (as I have written more than once by now) about recommending using machine translations to other people. Any guide or recommendation should have the disclaimer that there are serious objections due to severe quality concerns.
4 minutes ago, phantomJS said:Now it's my turn to ask you: did you even read what I wrote? This thread is NOT intended to promote MTL but to serve as a reference to anyone who wishes to go into MTL-ing VNs themselves.
I did read it and I would classify it as a guide or recommendation. In fact I would argue that it's both. When you published a guide, you will at the same time tell people it's fine to follow it. When you publish a recommendation (even an indirect recommendation), people will object to it as a recommendation.
This makes me wonder. Is it the case that people objected to the recommendation while the MT support failed to see the recommendation, meaning the split is based on how much people read from the same words. If people don't catch such a deeper meaning, they will not notice if it's gone in the MT.
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1 hour ago, phantomJS said:
you (and many others that replied in this thread) could have disagreed and explained your stance and reasons on why you think MTL-ing VN is very bad.
Did you even read what I wrote? Here is a summary:
- translation tend to be incorrect
- lines can appear like they are somewhat correct without being so, creating a false sense of trust in the translation quality
- translation doesn't take context into consideration
- no consistency, like an object or person can change name, which hides it's the same object
- no editing. You focus on decoding the text rather than on the contents of the text, which hurts the reading enjoyment
What more do you want me to explain?
1 hour ago, phantomJS said:Instead, you (like others here) adopted a very hard line and very condescending attitude towards MTL, which I feel is very over-the-top among other thoughts that I have.
Imagine two people with a boat and they discover a hole in it. A says if they put it in water, it will sink. B says we will never know unless we try it.
Why this story? It's because A is very absolute and it's based on knowledge, possibly even experience. B will accuse A of eliteism and wants to go ahead regardless of what A says. It's kind of like the same in this thread. If you already decided to follow the path of machine translations regardless of what other people say, you will see other people as obstructions unless they praise your choice.
18 minutes ago, phantomJS said:my stance will always be to let the users know what I think of a particular subject and why and let them choose for themselves what is right.
Same here. If you want to use the software you mentioned, then I won't stop you. My point is (as I have written more than once by now) about recommending using machine translations to other people. Any guide or recommendation should have the disclaimer that there are serious objections due to severe quality concerns.
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13 hours ago, TheCrimsonFucker said:
I don't even get why is this a debate. Yes MTL is bad and sometimes get's things completly wrong, but it's up to the individual if they want to read that way. It hurts nobody expect the readers reading experience and that person most likely knows full well what they are getting into.
This is the main issue. People encouraging other people to use MT. If you don't know much about MT or translations, then it sounds tempting and then people go into MT without knowing what they are going into. Multiple people have said the issue is not what people do themselves, but what they recommend to other people. I tried MT based on recommendations, which turned out to be based on false facts about quality.
And yes, it's important to understand what the tools does and that generally speaking, the tools aren't bad. Both text hooking and Translation Aggregator works well for both MT and as assistance for reading Japanese. In fact getting the text as text is extremely valuable if you want to copy paste kanji or words into dictionaries or similar.
Likewise machine translations is not all bad. They actually do ok in some cases. They handle technical descriptions surprisingly well (with occasional big blunders) while they do worse with spoken language. The problem with MT VNs is that they not only aim at using the least good part of MT, it also relies on expressions and references, which MT can't handle, making it even more confused. To top it off, MT is designed to translate contents, not anything related to reading pleasure. In other words you will likely have better luck using Google Translate on wikipedia pages than using it on VNs.
- phantomJS and Weiterfechten
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29 minutes ago, phantomJS said:
Your earlier posts feels a lot like blatant MTL bashing / Japanese proficiency elitism with posts such as this:
Point taken. I wrote something, but due to not being as verbose as usual, it could be read in multiple ways. I would classify this as a misunderstanding rather than an actual fight. An interesting fact is that I have seen real eliteism, going as far as to say even human translations done correctly with editors and quality control and everything should be considered bad because no translation is perfect and that people shouldn't be allowed to read VNs if they can't read them untranslated. I hate people like that and I have no intention of ever joining the group of people who thinks like that.
My statement still stand. If you get a list of all the stuff you apparently need to do to Atlas in order to make it "perfect", by the time you have figured out how to get Atlas to do that, if you had spent the same amount of time on just studying Japanese, there is a real chance you could beat Atlas in translation quality. If your setup is to just to forward everything to Google translate, then my statement isn't true, but I was thinking of the Atlas setup. In theory Atlas is vastly superior because it's actually doing grammatical analysis on the text. It does come at the price that you need to teach it words and give it grammatical rules to follow when the word is encountered (noun, gender of person etc), hence why setup could become time consuming.
31 minutes ago, phantomJS said:I'm not directing the 'calm down' comment at you, but rather at Toranth
Ahh, it was only the inside of () that was aimed at me. I did get somewhat confused with the following statement as it has nothing to do with what I wrote. Once again the start of a conflict, which was actually just a misunderstanding.
1 hour ago, phantomJS said:Replying like you did can't make us see your points and feelings.
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55 minutes ago, Erogamer said:
There are many sites and forums out there that ban political and religious discussions because of all the trolling and hate speech which gets out of hand. I think it is a good idea on a forum like this that has nothing to do with politics or religion.
That seems like a horrible idea. There is politics in everything. Being upset with pixel blur in Japanese media is politics because it's a statement about political decided laws. There is one famous person who succeeded in banning talk about religion and he introduced the term "political correctness", which is evaluation if political statements are of the right kind and as such should be allowed or not. That guy was named Josef Stalin. Is that a person we should use as a template for policy making?
The current rules are ok. What is important to remember is to be nice and as I mentioned earlier, try to get support for your statements, meaning they are justified. Just bashing somebody or some country or whoever for no reason shouldn't be allowed and I don't think it is.
Now take this thread. I have quite a number of objections to the first two replies to my last post. They make it sound like I'm mistaken, which made me start to plan replies with facts to back up what I wrote. However I never actually wrote it because I realized that instead of just putting up some facts to resolve the disagreement, it started to take shape of country bashing and possibly even personal attacks, or at least it's possible that the reader would view it as such. Rather than resolving anything, it would trigger an ugly fight and nobody wants that. My alternative option was to just ignore it. It's not nice to be called out as wrong without the ability to reply, but I decided to make that sacrifice in order to preserve Fuwa peace.
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51 minutes ago, phantomJS said:
I didn't manage to find any 'MTL scams' sources
VNDB used to be full of those and whenever somebody complained about lack of quality, somebody could reply "just do this and that and that problem is fixed". If you paid attention, you would realize it would grow into an endless list of fixes and it still wouldn't become anywhere near anything, which could be considered quality. It also totally ignored editing. I will call that a scam because it made people spend a lot of time doing more and more stuff and never reach the result they were promised.
I stopped paying attention to the VNDB boards and it might have vanished by now. After all it was a keyword to start a fight and they did ban a bunch of people for always somehow being involved whenever a thread turned into a fight.
51 minutes ago, phantomJS said:you could had explained your reasons of your apathy towards MTL at the start instead of leaving it to the very last post -_-
But then the thread would be short and boring
I don't think I didn't explain anything earlier on. I added more details and tried explaining in a new way when it would appear people didn't get my point. To get my full point, you should read all my posts combined and not just assume the last is the final or complete one.
51 minutes ago, phantomJS said:Calm down bro
As always I am calm. If online stupidity/ignorance would upset me, then I would have had a heart attack ages ago.
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6 hours ago, phantomJS said:
If I get a random, VN hater to write rubbish to match the CGs, it's the same as reading a MTL-ed VN?
To me, seems like to you, caring about translation accuracy in a VN = getting the best possible translation you can in absolute terms (in this case, means learning Japanese) to read the VN and no compromises are accepted. You (and a lot of others) also seems to think MTL is (still) not humanly-comprehensible (or something similar).
I didn't say anything about VN haters. My main point is that there are people in the VN community, which praises MT and assume it can do stuff it can't. My point is that MT has a tendency to not only has a tendency to skip details, but also make up stuff. In other words using MT on a VN will result in a rewritten story, one where no human has looked at it for continuity or anything. If it's a new story made up based on CGs and written by somebody who cares, then there is a chance it will have a continuing story between the lines and scenes.
The main reason for my reaction here is not that I want to ban you from using MT if you really want to. I would not recommend it, but I won't try to convince you or ban you from doing so. The issue I have with this is encouraging other people to use MT. There are claims that you can get decent quality if you do it right and you will never suffer from titles not being translated and stuff like that. Claims like that are completely false and they serve mainly to trick people into thinking they start doing the right thing when they start to figure out how to use MT. Many people who believe it will start using MT and eventually regret it, calling it a complete waste of time. In other words praise of MT can arguably be called a scam, which end up wasting time for people.
I think it comes down to something else as well, which is editing. I read text before and after editing and here I made an important realization. The content was the same (more or less), but the edited script had become way more interesting to read. It's not just what it says, but particularly how it says it, which results in the reading pleasure. In other words even if the MT gets the translation down sort of ok, the editing will be awful, which will hurt the reading pleasure. MT can do a decent job if your task is to figure out say a manual for some software you try to figure out. It will not work well if you want anything with reading pleasure.
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2 minutes ago, phantomJS said:
Since you claimed google translate TL is poor even by MTL standards, mind letting us know which services, online translators, or software are better? (I'm interested to know as well out of curiosity) Thanks in advance!
As I wrote, it's supposed to be Atlas, which gets the job done the best. I have managed to get it to work better than google, but still being broken because I never did figure out how to control all the settings correctly (and I suspect it would be broken even if I did). Mind you it was a few years back and unlike Atlas, google will try to improve.
What would be really interesting would be a test where it's the different approaches at MT against a human translation. One thing MT (particularly Google) is surprisingly good at is to make something, which looks fine, but is actually horribly translated and is changing the meaning. I consider this to be a bigger problem than the plain odd translations since it will be undetectable to anybody who would consider using MT.
Promoting MT and refusing to talk about translation accuracy seems weird to me. You might as well get some random person (not a writer) to write new text in English to match the CGs. If you object, then you do care about translation accuracy.
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2 hours ago, Plk_Lesiak said:
(I take the intensity of the shit-puns as a positive reaction... Of sorts. ;p)
Really? I thought all the puns are based on the fact that the entire topic absolutely stinks
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1 hour ago, phantomJS said:
but the grammar and especially the kranji are extremely numerous.
Tip 1: learn how to spell "kanji"
Tip 2: Tae Kim states you should not study kanji. Instead when you learn new words, learn the kanji for it too and you will not be overwhelmed by the burden of kanji learning.
Tip 3: if you find the grammar to be too complex, how can you expect the computer to do better? It's usually much worse than the human mind at tasks like that.
2 hours ago, phantomJS said:I had it set up in TA now and ATLAS V14 TL sucks (or maybe I didn't know how to use/ set it up properly
). I use google translate and (I think) it's gives a decent idea of what does the original jpn text mean (doesn't matter too much if I'm wrong. Like I said, i'm not trying to get an exact replicate of the original text's meaning).
Seriously, I don't understand how you can compare the time needed to learn Japanese to setting up TL software (which is what I inferred from your post) as they are not even close to each other in that aspect.
As I wrote, Atlas is supposed to be the best option, but it requires tweaking. I actually tried MT to see what all the talk is about and I managed to get Atlas to work better than Google. The problem is that I still had a long way to go in order to reach what is supposedly the goal for those who claim MT are useful. If you settle for Google Translate, you aim for poor quality even by MT standards.
2 hours ago, phantomJS said:Also, can i just point out that setting up Translation Aggregator is one of the best ways to learn Japanese because of mecab / jparser?
Yeah and it's pretty much what I wrote you should use, though I worded it differently, like:
2 hours ago, tymmur said:if you had spent the same amount of time on ITH+TA+jparser [...]
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57 minutes ago, Zander said:
There's nothing wrong with MTL. Learning Japanese is a time-consuming, arduous task with minuscule payoff and little to no professional or vocational benefits. Not everybody wants to invest so great a portion of their life into learning a language solely for the consumption of visual novels.
Here is the thing. Setting up MT is not instant. There are multiple options and then you have to learn how to read the result, which in itself is a learning process. To get good quality (and here I use good in very relative terms), the word on the net is to use Atlas. You then have to make one dictionary for each VN. You add the names as names, apply gender and stuff like that. You are also supposed to add words often used in VNs, but not present in Atlas by default (mainly H scene words). Next you need to configure some line changing stuff to make the lines more readable for Atlas.
By the time you reached what is supposedly claimed to be acceptable MT level, if you had spent the same amount of time on ITH+TA+jparser and studied Japanese grammar, you would likely have ended up with the ability to read Japanese on a level where you have a decent chance of beating MT on quality and unlike MT, you have a chance to improve by just reading more.
If you claim you don't have the time to study Japanese to even reach this level, then apparently you don't have the time to set up MT or even read VNs either.
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3 hours ago, ittaku said:
I wrote a custom function to do line breaks in the reinsertion code for To Heart 2. It was aware of the on-screen line length and had some basic rules regarding spaces, periods, commas, quotation marks, and hyphens.
I wrote something like that for Musumaker as well. The problem with such an approach is kerning, as in some characters are shorter when followed by certain other characters. In order to add spaces correctly for this, you will likely need to use some sort of library to read the font and then get the width of the sentence that way. It's doable, but it requires more than just counting characters.
As for the name issue. One thing you should investigate is if you can add a newline. Some engines support it even if the Japanese script doesn't use it at all, sometimes as a newline and sometimes as \n. If the engine supports this, you can reserve a certain length, like what you estimate from say 16 characters and then end with a newline. This will result in the line being too short in most cases, but it will not cut words. It's not a good solution, but you can easily end up with not being able to get a good solution and only go for the least bad solution, in which case it could be an option.
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7 hours ago, Narcosis said:
Don't worry, mate. Translating is easy! You get a bunch of lines in Japanese and then you write the same lines in English 👌
5 hours ago, tymmur said:That's like saying winning a marathon is easy. You just have to run faster than everybody else. It's not wrong, but you need to do some training and apply some strategic approach to what you are doing in order to actually being able to do it. If it is as simple as you make it out to be, then machine translations would rule.
Apparently I need to explain this a bit better. Perhaps I was thinking a bit too much of the recent thread where the topic is about translators looking up every single word vs machine translations. What I was thinking when I wrote this is that some people have the idea that you can translate if you know the dictionary well and perhaps some grammar. However there are expressions and other cultural/historic references, meaning you can encounter text where you need to know more than just the words in order to translate.
Let's take this example. "Bob wants to join the team, but it turned out that he is really green". If you know English expressions, you will know it's not a reference to Bob being a green skinned alien. It's actually about experience even though the word experience is not mentioned.
As a result of this, Canadians will require more training/studying than just the language itself while this is likely not an issue at all for native Japanese speaking people.
I suspect I make it sound worse than it is though. If you study like most people here, you will at some point read untranslated VNs by extracting the script and look up words, kanji etc and in addition to learning the language itself, such references will appear, allowing you to get a feeling of those and when they are used in addition to the general language learning.
From a technical point of view, it's true that the translator don't have to do anything other than read one line and then write the translated line. Other people should be in charge of extraction and all that. In other words the technical skills required from the translator is to do online research about a word, kanji, reference or whatever you need to look up.
What are best practices when designing and programming a VN?
in Creative Corner
Posted
This is the essence of what I would say. Writing on the computer is no good and while pen and paper is better for something like this, you need to go big and make an overview, something like this:
Place a pin to mark where the story starts. Next place one for each branching point and each ending. Next you put strings on the pins to indicate the flow of the story and to visualize how the branching points are connected. Next you take a small piece of paper, write the title of an event and then you pin it on/next to a string. Repeat with all the events. You will end up with a visual overview of distribution of events and order of events. As you write each scene in more detail, you will likely figure out some events needs to happen in a different order and you swap them as needed. Events can be a scene or just some information like "protagonist remembers having met heroine years ago". Basically you add a piece of paper for anything where order will affect how other events are written.
Back to the future had the script and hence the timeline made this way. Naturally without the branching points, but the order of events were planned like this. Some scenes required Marty to have experience with something and then that something was written on another paper and it had to go into the story earlier. A proper overview for planning is required for something like that to work well.
As for programming, I would say make a file for each event and give them proper names. This will help if you want to swap something at some point or insert a new scene between two existing scenes. Since the story has to match the plan, the files/programming should too or you will lose the overview.