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kivandopulus

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Posts posted by kivandopulus

  1. Visual novel = anime + novel for me, and theoretically it's the best medium to provide glorious long stories.

    I'm mostly fascinated with visual novels because of the amount of efforts the Japanese put into those. I compare the number of Western games with the number of Japanese Visual Novels over the same periods of times, and get absolutely shocked by the results of just one nation in just a single genre. And that goes even for early 80s - VNDB has only a small portion of Japanese visual novels from 80s.

    I'm absolutely assured in Japanese cultural supremacy in the last two decades. Anime, manga and dorama are too short to my liking and are too well covered, while visual novels offer thousands of worlds for tens of hours of time each, and remain in obscurity for all this time. Every big anime resource like MAL does not want to get involved with visual novels just because they aren't popular enough. Well, that's one thing that can change.

  2. Couple remarks to experiment conditions. Atlas and LEC are non-neuro machine translation services, so it's unfair to compare them with Google translate. I show comparison with other neuro machine translation services like Bing and Yandex. Another point is that substitutions are must have for difficult proper names. Once you subsitite 小鳥 for Kotori, you'll never see small bird in text. The same goes for Mihagino. There are also some tools to improve machine translation with honorifics like TAHelper and replacement scripts, but I did not explore them personally as I'm perfectly fine to see Mr. before girls names as I know that -san is meant.

    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Line 1
    Haruto -「はい、どうぞー」
    Personal translation: 「Come inー」

    Bing: Yes, please.
    Yandex: Yes, please.」
    Google Translate: "Yes, please."
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Line 2
    Ayano - 「失礼いたします」
    Personal translation: 「Excuse me.」

    Bing: I'm sorry.
    Yandex: Excuse me.」
    Google Translate: "excuse me"
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Line 3
    Narration - 入ってきたのは、花束を持った美萩野さんだった。
    Personal translation: It was Mihagino-san coming in holding a bouquet.

    Bing: It was Mr. Mihagino who came in with the bouquet.
    Yandex: Mihagino had a bouquet of flowers.
    Google Translate: Mihagino who had a bunch of flowers came in.
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Line 4
    Haruto - 「あ……っと、美萩野さん」
    Personal translation: 「Ah... Oh, it's Mihagino-san.」

    Bing: "Oh... Mr. Mihagino.
    Yandex: Ah....... Mihagino, Mihagino, Mihagino, Mihagino」
    Google Translate: "Ah ...... Uh, Mihagino-san"
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Line 5
    Ayano - 「お見舞いにうかがったのですが、お邪魔ではありませんか?」
    Personal translation: 「I'm visiting you since you were sick. I hope I'm not disturbing you?」

    Bing: "I was asked to visit, but do not disturb you? 」
    Yandex: "I asked for a visit, but is not it a bother you?"」
    Google Translate: "I was caught asking you, is not you in the way?"
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Line 6
    Narration - 驚きが顔に出てたのか、美萩野さんは申し訳なさそうに聞いてくる。
    Personal translation: I must have made a surprised face as Mihigano asked that apologetically.

    Bing: The surprise came out on the face, and Mihagino-San hears it apologetic.
    Yandex: Mihagino asked me if there was a surprise in his face.
    Google Translate: Mihagino asked to be sorry for a surprise appearing on the face.
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Line 7
    Haruto - 「いや、そんなことない。全然ないからっ」
    Personal Translation: 「Nah, that's not true. You're not disturbing me at all.」

    Bing: No, that's not true. Not at all. "
    Yandex: "No, it's not.Not at all.」
    Google Translate: "No, that's not true.
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Line 8
    Ayano - 「ありがとうございます。それでは、失礼いたします」
    Personal Translation: 「Thank you very much. Well then, excuse me.」

    Bing: "Thank you very much. I'll be sorry.
    Yandex: "Thank you.So, excuse me.」
    Google Translate: "Thank you very much, then I will excuse you."
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Line 9
    Narration - 持ってきてくれた花を花びんに生けると、前と同じようにベッドの脇の椅子に座った。
    Personal Translation: After she arranged the flowers she brought in a vase, she sat on the chair besides the bed like last time.

    Bing: I sat in a chair on the side of the bed as before, when I put the flowers that I brought in the vase.
    Yandex: When I put the flower in the flower vase, I sat on the chair by the bed as before.
    Google Translate: When I lived on a flower with the flowers that brought me, I sat on the chair next to the bed just as before.
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Line 10
    Haruto - 「ありがとう。来てくれて、嬉しいよ」
    Personal Translation: Thank you. I'm glad you came.

    Bing: Thank I'm so glad you're here.
    Yandex: "Thank you.I'm glad you're here.」
    Google Translate: "Thank you, I am glad you came"
    ----------------------------------------------------------

    Conclusion:

    Gender, multiple meanings in context and honorifics remain weak points. There's no arguing that manual translation is better. The actual question is what variants you have to read untranslated works:

    1.  JUST LEARN JAPANESE ALREADY! The best variant, but requires either 2+ years of dedicated study with some study group or 5+ years of dedicated study alone, or eternity if you slack.

    2. Manual translation. Takes at least x10 times more to read any visual novel, making forget previous events with time and lose enthusiasm with such horrible pace. In theory should help learning Japanese. In practice makes you drowsy each 10 minutes resulting in never finishing anything without proper dedication.

    3. Machine neuro translation. Allows you to read whatever you want at a normal pace right away without big hit to the meaning provided you can put up with some broken grammar.

    There is no just one right answer. All people are different. First and second variants are suitable only for some 10% of people, others would get demotivated before finishing anything. I advocate for machine neuro translation only because it's available just as you set up your mind to try untranslated visual novels. You get to appreciate the media and then need to decide for yourself if you want to try more works this way first or start learning the language at this point. I also have selfish motives here as I'd like to see untranslated visual novels discussion bloom after all those dark decades for untranslated vns. For those who are 100% sure that reading machine neuro translations automatically makes you understand nothing, I only urge to try machine neuro translation and then read proper English translation. That will make you see for yourself whether there are myriads of hidden meanings lost in initial playthrough or it's the very same story.

  3. 1 hour ago, McDerpingheimer III said:

    You don’t even understand the basics of language or writing, how would you understand 99.9% of what you read

    Preliminary suggestion. I studied grammar extensively. I speak three foreign languages, and thanks to that I pick up vocabulary easily. I've no problem reading and understanding words in kana. All I miss is majority of kanji. But I'm sure that even with full kanji knowledge I would not be able to read walls of text in split second like I do in English, so I'd keep using machine translation for the sheer convenience. Visual novels have too much water that should be avoided, and dialogues bear almost all significant information. But if criticizing and suggesting nothing instead is your way, I won't waste my breath anymore.

  4. 23 minutes ago, Sayaka said:

    So you review machine translations of VNs?

    Not only review, but encourage everyone else to do so. As of now 80% of untranslated VNs don't even have descriptions, save for reviews. Those five people who actually know Japanese and do reviews focus only on recent games. Everyone else is just reading the same 200 translated VNs being offended by wrongly put commas etc trifles. Machine neuro translation is the best thing that happened to VN community since vndb creation and oh text hooker first release in 2003. Deny the progress, and the progress will deny you.

  5. 7 hours ago, tahu157 said:

    Can a food critic review a food they haven't tasted?

    A chauvinist approach again. I understand 99.9% of the Japanese text I read with machine translation + voice audition. I've seen such chauvinists in the past who say they'd read other reviews I collected (even reviews from densetsu), but not mine, since supposedly everyone else is 100% pro in Japanese. I'll definitely see more such people in the future. Good luck finding native Japanese to write reviews for you or writing them yourself after you learn language at 100%.

  6. 31 minutes ago, adamstan said:

    For Japanese it still is, because it is unable to grasp the context, and it can change everything when translating from Japanese. So yes, it tries to translate sentences instead of a single words, but still often produces complete garbage - that is even more misleading, because often looks almost like normal english :P

    Somehow I never perceive translated result literally. I still transform it in my head. And if it's a spoken line, it's enough just to listen to it. If an important line makes no sense, I still break it into parts of speech and translate word-by-word. I'm mostly interested in the stories, thus in sentence composition, nouns and verbs which is usually handled by machine neuro translation brilliantly. I agree that it's not good enough enjoy the text and it can break the atmosphere.

  7. 11 minutes ago, Sayaka said:

    Wait, what?

    For the last two years I've only been reading visual novels in my free time at home easily covering 10 hours per weekend as a result. Don't try to repeat that, though. At my MMORPG days I could play for 20 hours per day. Such endurance only comes after years and years of training.

  8. 1. I never learned Japanese, although I can understand spoken Japanese after all these years of cultivating Japanese atmosphere around myself

    2. Watching anime since around 2008, reading VNs since 2014 or so. Ran out of translated VNs, so had to move forward to terra incognita.

    3. Don't remember first untranslated one. Might be Kikokugai, but I was not aware of translation, so had to translate it myself with mecab+edict and trying to grasp speech. It's not that difficult to understand provided that it's voiced and has mostly action scenes.

    4. All those word-by-word translations are waste of time, and I doubt it really helps learning language. I use ITHVNR+Translation Aggregator (Bing/Yandex machine translation). Google neuro translation introduced in November 2016 made the whole world change for me. It translates not words, but sentences, and it drew translation to a whole new quality level rendering engines that still use word-to-word translation obsolete.

    5. We're living in the age post google (and now also Bing and Yandex) neuro translation revolution. It's absolutely the best time to live. There's no need to spend half of your life to learn the language now. Start right away and pick up audio skills automatically in the meantime. It really grieves me when people consider google machine translation piece of crap like it used to be prior to November 2016.

  9. On 2/17/2019 at 11:27 AM, fhc said:

    2 days ago google not working anymore with  Translation Aggregator

    Looks like Hongfire forum about Translation Aggregator is dead.

    Lolwut?! If you read hongfire Translation Aggregator thread properly you could find out that I was writing about this second wave of google machine translation problem as early as 20th July. Sinflower actively supports Translation Aggregator and makes fixes very fast where fix is possible. But if you looked at his answer on 25th September - there are no tricks to dodge google IP ban after long use of translation services. You can check it by accessing google translation web version after this temporary ban, and it won't be accessible as well. I wrote many times in that thread that BING and Yandex are the new Google for machine translation - quality is almost non-distinguishable. For shorter play sessions (30-60 minutes) it's still possible to use google. Stop declaring something is dead if you don't even try to understand the problem here.

  10. On 2/6/2019 at 12:57 PM, Chronopolis said:

    PS: speaking of no comedy, it reminds me of Sakura no Mori Dreamers which I played a while back. Full length action/horror with no comedy to lighten the mood. It was so stifling I dropped it.

    Which one did you drop? I did not have enough courage to play old-fashioned Aozora myself, so I greatly appreciate any positive/negative feedback on the game like the fact of drop and reason for it.

  11. Doki Doki Literature Club! feels like One ~Kagayaku Kisetsu e~ since you await a very light romance comedy and it indeed starts this way, but ends up something very different.

    Analogue: A Hate Story reminds me of DOOP as you're stuck in a close space inside the spaceship trying to uncover a mystery.

    Sakura Spirit resembles Toushin Toshi II for me as both provide a rewarding RPG system with sudden bursts of naked girls.

  12. I probably have the most exotic view on how to make visual novels popular.

    My answer is treat readers like intelligent adults by providing the most interesting stories the media has to offer. And translated VNs are suffocating for their seemingly large, but in fact very limited number of quality works with interesting stories. So naturally my attention falls to untranslated works. But that alone raises multiple issues - awareness, availability, language barrier, erotic scenes.

    I'm trying to raise awareness by giving small overviews to as broad range of visual novels as possible starting with the oldest. That provides description for obscure games and creates a solid timeline-based structure to see actual evolution of the media.

    Availability is another issue. How to make visual novels available from the browser? By providing video playthroughs! But visual novels aren't your usual games. They usually last for 30+ hours and require concentration which is ruined by bashing commentaries of let's players in my opinion.

    Language barrier is probably the gravest issue. Learning Japanese takes at least three years of diligent study and there's the need to read right now. Before 2014 google translate neural update I could not stand machine translation - excite, baidu, old google, honyaku, atlas are all just a joke so I had to read slowly through edict + mecab parsing. But google translate update made machine translation viable, so I feel absolutely comfortable reading with it. I perfectly understand what's being said out-loud without any translation and it's characters who usually move the plot, but I don't want to struggle through protagonist uneventful lines as well as narrator descriptions.

    Erotic scenes are easily eliminated with video editing. I usually make it perfectly clear that such scene ensues by giving 5 second censored footage and then skip scene entirely. From my experience in less that 1% of visual novels such scenes actually provide crucial for plot information. For the same reason we have censored versions of visual novels published now in Steam and those don't really stop being good games at all. Even Maitetsu that had the whole point of the game in fully animated erotic scenes managed to get to Steam so that we could assess its other sides. I actually had to drop the game as soon as I stumbled upon the first such scene, the disgust was that high - but now I will finally be able to play (or watch) it one day.

    My point is that limiting ourselves to nukige, translated works and the mess of EVN is not the only option. In order not to sink in this swamp we have to nurture refined tastes by reading such outstanding story-focused works as DiaboLiQuE, Luv wave, EVE: The Lost One, EVE Zero, EVE TFA, ELLE and some less perfect, but still very curious obscure species that I provide at my channel.

  13. 6 hours ago, Zakamutt said:

    delete people using frontpage and not unread content tbh

    I'm not doing either. Going directly to blogs page each time...

    Absolutely agree with Plk_Lesiak that dev update feed should go from front page. But I'm also concerned about blogs page since Dev Boards Updates have not been updated for a year and FuwaReviews Team for over two years and they keep on being pinned and require scrolling down each time not to mention the image in Dev Boards Updates hanging for a year and my eyes really get weary of it. There's already Featured Entries on top of the page so why also having two ancient pinned threads as well...

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