people who use machine translation to read novels

[Pabloc]

Machine translation is most useful when combined with an elementary knowledge of the language however.  It can disentangle complex grammar and expressions that might give novices issues, while the types of mistakes it makes are often something even a beginning language learner can grasp.  The two angles complement each other fairly well.  I still use ATLAS as a reference even now when I come across unfamiliar grammar, or complex sentences that are hard to store in memory long enough to puzzle out what they mean.

 

Eh, really? When I still had ATLAS installed on my old PC, whenever I encountered a bit more complicated sentence I was checking what it would do with it for lolz. And it was always completely wrong. I don't mean "most of the time" - it didn't get a single thing right (not to mention that in more than half of those ceases it was producing undecipherable gibberish). And it was back when I was reading mostly just simple nukiges...

 

Also machine translation should in my opinion only be used as a tool to get better at japanese (while reading a VN of course)

 

I don't think that's possible. You can learn with MeCab/JParser (and it's a super-effective method), but not with MTs. They are making far too many mistakes to be used as any reference. You could end up learning things that are actually completely wrong.

 

As for "throw your PC out of the window" recommendation/challenge, I raise you this: https://vndb.org/v5835

It has extremely simplistic and crude writing. Actually, it's so bad that I didn't like it even though it's filled with lolis, and that says a lot. It's among the easiest things I have ever read. However, almost all heroines speak in funny way (childish lisping, Kansai accent, etc.), and that would probably totally rape any machine translator. XD

[Down]

Forget even machine TL, when you play using a hooker and a parser, at least one sentence out of three will get parsed wrong. Parsers break on everything: the slightest slang, a typo, and so many grammar forms that it's not even worth listing. So even when you're learning japanese you have to deal with parsers failing all the time, and with japanese to english dictionaries entries being far from perfect.

That simple fact will already induce nonsense and false sense everywhere in the subsequent translation, and there's an uncountable number of other reasons that will make the machine translation completely fail in 90% of the sentences you read

 

The problem is that, the brain is pretty good at making sense out of nonsense. But you have absolutely no idea if the meaning you're infering is the right one or not. Playing through a machine translation means you're bound to misunderstand what you read, and that most of the time you won't even notice that you misunderstood.

[Justin579]

I wish we had the technology like you see in the movies that would perfectly translate everything. Then we would never have to wait years for anything to get translated

[Nashetania]

Did you really understand Fortissimo's chuuni with it? (I haven't read Fortissimo so I don't know how hard it is)

Yep. Understood whole story, although it might because, like I said, I understood what they were saying already without translation.

 

I wish we had the technology like you see in the movies that would perfectly translate everything. Then we would never have to wait years for anything to get translated

 

It's important to have dreams.

[Pabloc]

Forget even machine TL, when you play using a hooker and a parser, at least one sentence out of three will get parsed wrong. Parsers break on everything: the slightest slang, a typo, and so many grammar forms that it's not even worth listing.

They definitely fail at parsing hiragana/katakana, but do a decent job parsing words with Kanji. And providing quick lookup for Kanji (or just furigana) is the only thing MeCab/JParser have to do really - kana is easily readable, so people who learned the necessary basics should be able to parse it themselves without issues. Well, at least I never had any problems with that.

 

I agree about JP-ENG dictionaries though, they are far from perfect. They work to some extent, but looking up stuff in JP-JP dictionary is definitely necessary.

 

I wish we had the technology like you see in the movies that would perfectly translate everything. Then we would never have to wait years for anything to get translated

We have it already. It's called "human brain".

[Justin579]

They definitely fail at parsing hiragana/katakana, but do a decent job parsing words with Kanji. And providing quick lookup for Kanji (or just furigana) is the only thing MeCab/JParser have to do really - kana is easily readable, so people who learned the necessary basics should be able to parse it themselves without issues. Well, at least I never had any problems with that.

 

I agree about JP-ENG dictionaries though, they are far from perfect. They work to some extent, but looking up stuff in JP-JP dictionary is definitely necessary.

 

We have it already. It's called "human brain".

years to learn*

[Kaguya]

We have it already. It's called "human brain".

 

Not really. There are a lot of ways to translate different things, and it's never perfect. It's  part of why translation debates can get very heated. 

 

Would be great to have that technology, though. 

[FunkyBoy]

It's extremely time consuming and exhausting, but once a foundation has been set, you can understand things with relative ease (albeit still a large effort). It's even faster if you don't care about actually learning anything new (vocab, Kanji, etc*) but just want to follow the plot of the game.

 

*I suppose an exception should be made for grammar, because everything else can be looked up on the spot, but if you don't know the grammar that is the crux of the sentence..

[Codesterz]

I see a lot of people mentioning ATLAS. I personally recommend using LEC's offline translator. On rare occasion it'll fail to translate some of the text, but it's much better than ATLAS in my opinion. I use VNReader for my machine translation reading. I have LEC, ATLAS, and Google translations showing at all times. Having 3 translations being displayed at once makes it easier to figure out what's being said. Though 90% of the time I just read the LEC translation, but when I run into a troublesome sentence having the other 2 translations can be helpful. The way I see it LEC is usually the most accurate, Google gives the easiest to read sentence structure but is the least accurate, and ATLAS falls somewhere in between.

[ittaku]

Unless you're using MT to aid already having knowledge of Japanese, doing it is sheer utter desperation. I know, as I did it for 5 minutes then vowed to learn Japanese... It's not even a matter of whether it can detect all the right words or not, as the grammar cannot by any technology available today be deciphered reliably automatically even when the language is very simple without slang, personal quirks, idioms and so on. Which means you may well get the verb right but it will more often than not get wrong who is doing the action to whom, let alone why. Anything with any semblance of a storyline is indecipherable. Perhaps if you think just getting the nouns and verbs mostly right gives you a "story" you'll be happy... but you're seriously missing out since you're almost certainly doing it with a visual novel you really really want to do out of desperation and ruining it at the same time. Of course nothing of what I say will discourage anyone from doing it if they're already happy to do so, but given there are so many translated visual novels out there, why get hung up on the hype of the latest one that isn't? No matter what your complaint about the translation quality of any of the existing translated novels may be, your experience with them will be much closer to what was intended than machine mangulation will be. Until our computing power has artificial intelligence, machine translation from a language like Japanese will remain out of reach.

[sanahtlig]

I use ATLAS because it's one of the few translators that still work with Translation Aggregator.  The parsing interface in VNR is terrible, so I only use VNR as a text hooker.

 

The problem is that, the brain is pretty good at making sense out of nonsense. But you have absolutely no idea if the meaning you're infering is the right one or not. Playing through a machine translation means you're bound to misunderstand what you read, and that most of the time you won't even notice that you misunderstood.

 

That's not really true.  Language is redundant.  Translation inaccuracies can be picked out simply by comparing with the surrounding text.  That's why I'm often puzzled that edited machine translations are so terrible.  I suspect that some people are better at the fuzzy matching + context-dependent updating than others.  It's definitely a skill that can be honed.  Or it could simply be that people aren't devoting the necessary concentration to the task (i.e., they're fixing the grammar without bothering to rewrite the sentences to make sense).

[Codesterz]

Unless you're using MT to aid already having knowledge of Japanese, doing it is sheer utter desperation. I know, as I did it for 5 minutes then vowed to learn Japanese... It's not even a matter of whether it can detect all the right words or not, as the grammar cannot by any technology available today be deciphered reliably automatically even when the language is very simple without slang, personal quirks, idioms and so on. Which means you may well get the verb right but it will more often than not get wrong who is doing the action to whom, let alone why. Anything with any semblance of a storyline is indecipherable. Perhaps if you think just getting the nouns and verbs mostly right gives you a "story" you'll be happy... but you're seriously missing out since you're almost certainly doing it with a visual novel you really really want to do out of desperation and ruining it at the same time. Of course nothing of what I say will discourage anyone from doing it if they're already happy to do so, but given there are so many translated visual novels out there, why get hung up on the hype of the latest one that isn't? No matter what your complaint about the translation quality of any of the existing translated novels may be, your experience with them will be much closer to what was intended than machine mangulation will be. Until our computing power has artificial intelligence, machine translation from a language like Japanese will remain out of reach.

 

While it is true there are a lot translated visual novels out there only about 10 of them have perked my interest at all. While I know a lot of people will disagree with me, many of them don't look interesting to me because of the visuals. Yes story and such is important, but for me it is a visual novel not a novel novel. If the visuals don't appeal to me I have no motivation to give it a shot. This is why I have never read visual novels like Fate/Stay Night or Sharin no Kuni, Himawari no Shoujo. I dislike the art styles and the low resolution only makes matters worse. Also lately translated visual novels have been leaning to the all ages side of things which is just as big of a turnoff for me. Might as well just watch an anime. Something I like about visual novels is you have adult content, but unlike H-anime and H-manga it tends to be towards the end of the story instead of having an adult scene forced every single episode or chapter. Something that makes machine translations easier for me to deal with is I have been watching subbed anime for about 14 years now. Thanks to this I have a general understanding of what is being said with many voiced lines. Though I do agree unless you are really desperate you should probably avoid machine translations. In my case I'm really desperate. My fetish preferences also don't help much either...

[Pabloc]

years to learn*

Just to read VNs? Nah - make that "months".

 

Not really. There are a lot of ways to translate different things, and it's never perfect. It's  part of why translation debates can get very heated. 

 

Would be great to have that technology, though. 

Well, yeah - there's no such thing as "perfect" translation. You can get perfect results only when you skip the "translation" part and read things in the original language.

 

The way I see it LEC is usually the most accurate, Google gives the easiest to read sentence structure but is the least accurate, and ATLAS falls somewhere in between.

How do you judge accuracy? Just curious.

 

That's not really true.  Language is redundant.  Translation inaccuracies can be picked out simply by comparing with the surrounding text.  That's why I'm often puzzled that edited machine translations are so terrible.  I suspect that some people are better at the fuzzy matching + context-dependent updating than others.  It's definitely a skill that can be honed.  Or it could simply be that people aren't devoting the necessary concentration to the task (i.e., they're fixing the grammar without bothering to rewrite the sentences to make sense).

When the translation is very bad, editing it often causes more harm than good. Rewriting mistranslated stuff to make it match the mistranslated surrounding text and mistranslated context is pretty much guaranteed to screw everything up even further. That's why edited MTs are so terrible. That, and the fact that smart people probably wouldn't waste their time on editing those...

[Codesterz]

How do you judge accuracy? Just curious.

 

I'm judging accuracy mainly on what I do understand of Japanese from my experience with anime. Sometimes there are phrases or sentences they'll say that I have heard in an anime and LEC's translation is the closest to what was used in the fansubs for the anime. Commonly when a sentence comes up that don't understand what is being spoken LEC's translation sounds the most accurate based on the flow of the conversation. I've seen A LOT of animes and have read many mangas/light novels/visual novels. Because of that I can commonly can tell what a character will say(in general not word for word) before they even say it by factoring in things like the flow of conversation, the characters personality, etc. By no means are there translation perfect you'll still have to deal with the word 'its' as machine translations are no good when it comes to context.

[Vokoca]

Once, there was a person who read Sayooshi with machine TL, and the summary of the plot he gave when he was finished was almost even more fascinating than the one in the VN - that is to say, it was completely different. Sayooshi isn't some extremely vague work, and even if there are some finer points, it usually goes out of its way to point out where things stand with a sentence or two every so often. And the person with the machine TL missed all of that completely, even plot points that were apparent halfway through the VN already. Could be just the individual reader for sure, but I think this puts machine TL into perspective quite well. 

 

At least when you use a praser, you probably already have enough knowledge about the language to spot the mistakes it makes anyway, but with machine TL, where you rely on a different language completely, that's not really possible.

[Deep Blue]

A little test I did:

粉雪 ねえ 時に頼りなく心は揺れる それでも僕は君のこと守り続けたい 粉雪 ねえ 心まで白く染められたなら 二人の孤独を包んで空にかえすから

 

What it really means:

powdered snow, my heart sometimes has doubts but I still want to keep protecting you, powdered snow, if you could dye our hearts until they turn white so it can wrap our loneliness and send it to the sky -

my translation is far from perfect and I'm still not sure about "the send it to the sky or warm it up in the sky"  but the translation of the machine it doesn't make any sense ... and it's not complex or anything . Google seems to be the most accurate one.

[Satsuki]

Well...that's why they said "don't use Atlas".

Btw, I actually don't understand your translation either.

[Deep Blue]

Then how can someone says that you can read an entire vn and still understand the plot... it is gibberish, it doesn't happen only with Japanese, if you translate something from english to spanish (or vice-versa) you will get the same result, any language you chose will give you the same result, machine translations are good only for really really short sentences and nothing more.

 

 

Well...that's why they said "don't use Atlas".

Btw, I actually don't understand your translation either.

it's from a lyric, what is it that you don't understand, how would you translate it then?

[Satsuki]

Well, I mean, if even "human translation" can't make sense out of that sentence, then how can machine translation

Stay away from VN with too complicated language or involving too many unique terms and you will be fine.

 

And no, don't use MT to translate song lyrics, lots of them are meaningless from the start, so it's not unusual for MT to mess them up even more.

[Bolverk]

MT's are but a crutch. It's like having an intelligent monkey on a typewriter giving you his translations to you. You try to make sense out of his gibberish english. This does actually work to some degree. But you will never be smarter than the monkey.

Damn the monkey, spend a few months practising jp, kick the monkey out of the door and do the entire process yourself. The first months are the biggest hassle, after that it's a better experience than using a MT.

[Pabloc]

my translation is far from perfect and I'm still not sure about "the send it to the sky or warm it up in the sky"  but the translation of the machine it doesn't make any sense ... and it's not complex or anything.

Ahaha... no. That's far too complex for MTs. It's more like bullying than the test really. At the very least, you should try MT-ing each line of the lyric separately, instead of copypasting it as a whole.

Actually, even when you write the TL like this it's kinda hard to decipher. But with separated lines (and a few minor changes):

Hey, powdery snow,

sometimes my unreliable heart wavers,

but I still want to keep protecting you.

Hey, powdery snow,

if you could dye our hearts white,

we could wrap up our loneliness and send it back to the sky.

 

Or something like that.

 

Also, what Bolverk said. Learning basic JP is a hassle for a few months, while relying on MTs is a hassle all the time.

[Deep Blue]

I thought it was an easy test guess it was not, but to be fair you read more complex things in a vn.

I liked your translation more but mine wasnt that bad after all

 

MT's are but a crutch. It's like having an intelligent monkey on a typewriter giving you his translations to you. You try to make sense out of his gibberish english. This does actually work to some degree. But you will never be smarter than the monkey.

Damn the monkey, spend a few months practising jp, kick the monkey out of the door and do the entire process yourself. The first months are the biggest hassle, after that it's a better experience than using a MT.

[Nagito]

Honestly, I only tried this once, with Heart no Kuni no Alice... And I couldn't get past the introduction scene. It was just too difficult to understand, sadly. I guess there's an English app version of it out now, but after reading the prologue the translation was almost as bad as the auto-translation I got from trying to use a translation machine to play the original release. Some fans were doing a translation patch but they haven't put out any updates since 2013. Very unfortunate. 

[Justin579]

https://vndb.org/v11194

 

This one I have been dying to read and I actually gave it a go but it was so atrocious I couldn't understand anything. Maybe I should give it another go since I guess it won't ever be translated.

[Deep Blue]

https://vndb.org/v11194

 

This one I have been dying to read and I actually gave it a go but it was so atrocious I couldn't understand anything. Maybe I should give it another go since I guess it won't ever be translated.