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Is it worth it to use visual novel reader to read untranslated visual novels


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:reeee: :reeee:

I wouldn't recommend reading a vn using MT but I've seen people that do and they actually understand what is going on. Most importantly they enjoy the VNs they read, so try it out and find out for yourself if it works for you or not. You can also learn Japanese in the meantime.

You should use punctuation marks and question marks, it's really hard to understand what you wrote.

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It really depends on the novel.

Some have really difficult japanese, so you really shouldn't try on those... But others have fairly simple sentence structure, and VNR works pretty good for a machine translation.

Using some really really random percentage, I would say you'll grasp 70~80% of the game. But the most important thing is patience, since your reading speed for broken english will be surely slower.

What I recommend is to try for yourself and see if you can handle! As Deep Blue said, if you're understanding and enjoying, what other people think shouldn't stop you!

 

Aaand, as I noticed, non-native speakers usually tolerate more broken english. Maybe because we kinda speak like that...?

Anyway, good luck in your VNR adventures!

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I will say it comes down to one really important question: how well is the VN written? If the answer is that it has a bunch of quickly written semi-random text to glue H scenes (hence HCGs) together, then the demand to accurate translation is fairly minimal. If it's say a comedy where the puns are play on words, multiple kanji readings, references to historic events etc, then the VN will be absolutely ruined by MT as what you will end up with will essentially be a bunch of jokes, where the punchlines have been lost in translation.

 

I tried using MT with fairly mixed results (horrible and passable, not not good). I wrote about the problems to a question like this once and was met with a reply "that's because you didn't do this and that". Apparently you should be using Atlas to translate, make a custom dictionary, make it somehow alter the strings on the fly to make them more MT friendly and lots of other stuff. I tried a bit, but realized the amount of time and energy it takes to learn how to do everything right is quite significant. If you spend the same amount of time and energy on studying Japanese, you likely have reached the level where you can hook into VNs to get the text, pass it to stuff like Jparser and read it that way. The difference here is that you essentially get the Japanese sentence and when hovering over each word you get the dictionary lookup for that word, meaning you are actually translating yourself. Getting skills in MT setup will never result in anything perfect while reading Japanese can be perfected over the years.

 

Once I did a test. I used the Jparser approach to translate VN dialogue (20 lines or so). Those lines were then corrected by a real translator. It looks like I caught the essence of the text better than MT would have done. In fact the only problem was grammar. I had a bit of a problem telling the precise relationship between words, like "Jack kissed Jill", "Jack was kissed by Jill", "Jack didn't kiss Jill". This means if you study Japanese grammar rather than MT setup, you will end up with a better quality for the same effort. It should be noted that I didn't study Japanese grammar at all before this test. In fact my combined Japanese studies at that time was likely around a day or so.

 

Jparser is not good enough to become a quality translator in itself, but here we are talking about Jparser vs MT and that comparison has a clear winner.

 

On 25/6/2017 at 2:33 AM, SomethingFunny31 said:

Sorry about that I was not really paying attention to what I was typing, and I was trying to type fast.

A good tip is to read what you wrote before posting. Check for typos and stuff like that to see if it's clear what you plan to say. Also if you reply, check if you answer the question or if you started to ramble about off topic stuff, which has little or nothing to do with the question you reply to. It's fairly simple and it really improves the quality of your posts. Good quality posts are easier to read, hence have a higher chance of getting the reply you want.

 

Though in this particular case, it might show that you are ready for MT since you use hard to read English yourself :P

 

On 25/6/2017 at 3:39 AM, MaggieROBOT said:

Aaand, as I noticed, non-native speakers usually tolerate more broken english. Maybe because we kinda speak like that...?

Sounds to me like the issue of people who claim they can multitask. Studies have revealed that people are equally bad at multitasking regardless of if they claim they are good at it or not. The difference is that people who claim they are good at multitasking will not increase quality/performance when given just one task while people who claim they are bad at multitasking will improve with just one task.

Likewise if non-English speakers are more willing to accept broken English, it might not be because they are better at adapting to it, it could be because they are so poor at English that they will not benefit from the enrich quality of the text, which uses proper English.

 

I have had the luxury of reading a VN (or rather parts of a VN) before and after editing. Both versions were proper English, but the attention to details and attention to overall flow between lines made the edited version way more enjoyable to read. It's also easier to remember what happened earlier in the story because your focus is on the read contents rather than the reading process itself. Maybe if the reader is so poor at English that they fail to benefit from this and have to focus mainly on the reading process, then they might not benefit from a well written/translated VN.

 

Semi-related note to this. One of the ways to tell if a child need glasses is if they can't remember what they read. This is due to the fact that 100% focus is on making out the text, leaving no brainpower to store the word, hence they fail to grasp the entire sentence. Another reason for needing 100% brainpower on reading could be dyslexia, which can also be indicated by failing to remember what the person just read. In other words it's scientifically proven that remembering a text is harder if the reading process is more challenging for the reader (no surprise there). I suspect the same applies to reading a foreign language, though I never thought of it that way before.

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