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A good Machine Translator?


Amano Sora

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5 minutes ago, Down said:

It doesn't exist.

Chiitrans and AGTH are not machine translators but hooking tools that link to machine translators like ATLAS, google tl, bing...

Hm... Then which one is the better one? Atlas google bing, etc.?

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13 minutes ago, Okarin said:

Yeah... shouldn't you be asking for a good online Japanese dictionary? I'll present you with this...

http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1C

I've used the JDIC site, however I prefer Jisho.org.  It's easier to use and also lets you do kanji lookups.  Besides, anything the JDIC site can do, JParser / MeCab can do quicker (since they all use the same dictionary).

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As many have mentioned there are no good machine translators. I use a program called Visual Novel Reader and have it showing translations for LEC, Atlas, and Google at the same time. Even with these programs some VNs will be unreadable. Some VNs they will work... ok.... with. You wont get pretty sentences you'll get the bare minimum of the meaning.

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Lol, legit every time a thread like this gets made at least 1/4 of the posts are "Learn Japanese". While I would like to say there is an easier way, honestly their isn't. Machine translators are terrible, fan Tls are slow/unreliable, so your best option as a VN fan is to eventually bite the bullet and learn Japanese. I just hope your interest in porn games are strong enough to motivate you to learn an entire language ;P. (Honestly though, learning a language is always a good use of time. Even if it is for porn games.

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As already stated, there is no such thing as a good machine translator. One of the biggest problems is even calling them machine translators. They are only electronic dictionaries with rudimentary grammar deconstruction to figure out what verb conjugation is being used. It's used as an aid for someone who already understands some Japanese to begin with to aid with unfamiliar vocabulary, kanji, etc. Those who don't know Japanese and try to read/watch/play things in Japanese use text hookers and friends initially thinking this is going to be the godsend. Usually it doesn't take long to realise that what you're looking at doesn't remotely turn into even a tiny semblance of what's written in Japanese. Sorry, but true, good, machine translation is decades if not centuries away since it would need true artificial intelligence - and despite anything you read, we haven't even begun making real progress in that area.

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Something I did forget to mention is Chinese to English machine translation works better than Japanese to English. If a VN has a a Chinese translation you can use those with a machine translator and in most cases you will get something a bit more understandable.  Don't be expecting a miracle though it is still a machine translation and will not give you something very readable.

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13 minutes ago, Codesterz said:

Something I did forget to mention is Chinese to English machine translation works better than Japanese to English. If a VN has a a Chinese translation you can use those with a machine translator and in most cases you will get something a bit more understandable.  Don't be expecting a miracle though it is still a machine translation and will not give you something very readable.

Machine translating to English from a Chinese fan translation sounds like a bad idea if you're actually interested in getting at the original meaning.  Not to mention you greatly reduce your chances of actually learning any JP in the process.

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I think a fair number of people begin the long journey to learning JP by starting out with machine translators.  No point in excluding future directions before you even start.  Machine translators DO cause you to associate JP words with English meanings, and that is useful.  Rule-based machine translators like ATLAS (but not statistical translators like Google Translate) are systematic and will always give you the same translation for a given phrase.  This is useful for learning.  Human translators will not.

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I know this is just further beating the dead horse, buuuuut...

oxymoron-examples.jpg

+ Good machine translation

Seriously, if there were good machine translators, none of us would bother with learning Japanese.  Back in high school I tried to use Google Translate to get through Spanish 1 without any effort early on in the semester.  I got very low scores since the teacher realized what I was doing quite easily due to the poor grammar and plain sentences GT spit out.  If they can't even get Spanish right, I doubt that any translation program will make good JP -> EN TLs in the foreseeable future.

Also, please don't use Bing to translate stuff, it is one of the worst translation programs I've ever seen.  It tends to render sentences in one language into incomprehensible gibberish instead of into broken but understandable English like what the rest of the machine TLs do.

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5 minutes ago, Zenophilious said:

I know this is just further beating the dead horse, buuuuut...

oxymoron-examples.jpg

+ Good machine translation

Seriously, if there were good machine translators, none of us would bother with learning Japanese.  Back in high school I tried to use Google Translate to get through Spanish 1 without any effort early on in the semester.  I got very low scores since the teacher realized what I was doing quite easily due to the poor grammar and plain sentences GT spit out.  If they can't even get Spanish right, I doubt that any translation program will make good JP -> EN TLs in the foreseeable future.

Also, please don't use Bing to translate stuff, it is one of the worst translation programs I've ever seen.  It tends to render sentences in one language into incomprehensible gibberish instead of into broken but understandable English like what the rest of the machine TLs do.

You need to use freetranslation. They have good translations for stuff like spanish and french, but for Japanese, forget about it and learn Japanese.

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