Should i try translating VN's like this?

[Okami]

I just get an idea about how could i translate VN's and i want you to tell me if it is possable to do it or not.

It is prety simple idea i take japanise text from VN's trow it in some of moust popular translation programs like for example SYSTRAN 7, Babylon 9, Power Translator Premium 14, ATLAS V14 or Promt Standard 9 and then i edit the text.

[Steve]

Often times machine tl can revert the meaning of the line entirely so it is not recommended.

What you will often find in VNs are speech patterns, unfinished words and such and for that no translator will help you. (for example when a girl is shy she can say parts of words and such translator would give you some gibberish).

So Machine -> edit is definitely not recommended.

maybe machine -> tlc -> edit might be possible, but then again the tlcer might even spend more time on a line than if he translated it from the scratch.

[garejei]

If you want to make quality/accurate translations, don't rely on programs like ATLAS. Get an actual person that knows Japanese.

[Blue]

I hear someone did sth like this with Flyable Heart (?) and it resulted in disaster...

[zoom909]

Computers can't think. They don't understand the meaning of what they're translating, therefore they suck at it

[Snowtsuku]

You are trading quality for speed if that's the case.

[Okami]

You are trading quality for speed if that's the case.

It is not my point to trade quality for speed rather to trade quality for well noting since I don't know Japanese nowhere near inaf to do the job. I am well aware that translate done this way wouldn't be of the same quality like the ones done by persons that acuely know Japanese but if it menage to translate it to English and don't change the meaning of it I think that it can be called a success. The only problem is that I am not sure if it can be done.

[Kaguya]

It is not my point to trade quality for speed rather to trade quality for well noting since I don't know Japanese nowhere near inaf to do the job. I am well aware that translate done this way wouldn't be of the same quality like the ones done by persons that acuely know Japanese but if it menage to translate it to English and don't change the meaning of it I think that it can be called a success. The only problem is that I am not sure if it can be done.

Well, it can certainly be done. Technically, there would be no problems with it.

However...

if it manages to translate it to English and don't change the meaning of it

Impossible. The meaning will most likely be changed.

[Okami]

Well, it can certainly be done. Technically, there would be no problems with it.

However...

Impossible. The meaning will most likely be changed.

If that's really the case then I guess that there is no point in even trying. Too bad I was really hoping that if I get some professional translation software it could be done .

[Roanstalker]

Edit: Oops misread it.

[Kimimaro]

i don't think u could rely on translator softwares.

[RusAnon]

Well, you can try doing it and see yourself how horrible result is. But yeah, answer is quite simple — don't try translating unless you already can read perfectly w/out any assistance. Translating is much more harder than reading, and requires high skills in both Japanese and English.

Also, community will totally hate you if you try this publicly, and we will get another "Cudder-Aaeru vs rest of the world" incident.

[RusAnon]

You are trading quality for speed if that's the case.

Btw, I see this misconception mentioned often in various places, esp. on /jp/, and cannot really understand where does it come from. MTL isn't anywhere as fast as manual word by word translation, nor as accurate. You cannot have decent performance with MTL if you want to output at least legitimate English.

[Clephas]

Japanese isn't suited to literal translation into English, and as a result when it is attempted by machine, the results tend to be fairly awful. If you want to produce something that retains a decent amount of meaning from the original game, you need a live human translator to work things.

[shcboomer]

Japanese isn't suited to literal translation into English, and as a result when it is attempted by machine, the results tend to be fairly awful. If you want to produce something that retains a decent amount of meaning from the original game, you need a live human translator to work things.

This is mostly true, even more so for VNs, since there are always tons of jokes and small cultural things that need to either be localized or changed in some sense.

[REtransInternational]

It is not my point to trade quality for speed rather to trade quality for well noting since I don't know Japanese nowhere near inaf to do the job. I am well aware that translate done this way wouldn't be of the same quality like the ones done by persons that acuely know Japanese but if it menage to translate it to English and don't change the meaning of it I think that it can be called a success. The only problem is that I am not sure if it can be done.

You should learn some more Japanese, then you will be able to find the errors and correct them.

The whole idea of using MT or any other technological assistance tends to be somewhat taboo subject in VN translation, because it can have such profound impact on the structure of the community. MT is a highly enabling technology - what used to exclusively require a small highly-trained set of professionals can now be done by anyone, albeit with some limitations (see below). This shifts the balance of power from the elite to the populace. Thus it should be no surprise that it is shunned and ostracised by the "old VNTL culture", the elite who want to maintain status quo.

About the limitations - often overexaggerated by the luddites, but it is very true: MT is NOT perfect (but is a human translator?) There is still much room for improvement, current systems tend to divide into two types which have their strengths and weaknesses:

* Statistical MT (sMT) - e.g. Google Translate, Bing, Moses - works similar model to a human brain (neurons). The core engine remains the same for multiple languages (so it is cheaper in development) and it relies on training data to learn how to translate. Advantages of this type are ease of deployment, expandable to any language, and if translating material very similar to the training data, it can produce very good results. It is also more flexible when dealing with e.g. misspellings, due to its statistical principle of operation. Disadvantages are large storage needed for the "brain" (accuracy scales directly in proportion to this, and Google currently has the equivalent capacity for one language similar to a small child...) and no language-specific learning, so it is difficult to tune. Large differences in language structure make for more difficulty (e.g. Google's French<>English translation is extremely good, but English<>Japanese/Chinese/Korean not so much.)

* Rule-based MT (rMT) - ATLAS, SYSTRAN - grammar rules of source and target languages are programmed into the engine (parser) and it translates based on a dictionary. Advantages are opportunities for language-specific tuning (e.g. word separation in Japanese), easier to modify for special-casing, and possibly more accurate (but maybe slightly ungrammatical) output, depending on the rules implemented. Disadvantages are that it is development-intensive as each rule needs to be programmed explicitly, and this has to be done for each specific language pair. These systems depend on accurate rules and dictionary data.

There are also hybrid systems available, and I think they are going to be the most successful; core grammar rules can be encoded as in rMT, but the rules that are less easy to express e.g. words appearing in context, can be handled statistically.

Btw, I see this misconception mentioned often in various places, esp. on /jp/, and cannot really understand where does it come from. MTL isn't anywhere as fast as manual word by word translation, nor as accurate. You cannot have decent performance with MTL if you want to output at least legitimate English.

It's not a misconception. Accuracy is less, but speed is several orders of magnitude higher. For example, the first two paragraphs of this article are approximately 4.5K characters output from Google Translate. Assuming you have a human translator who can output at 100WPM/500CPM with perfect accuracy (rather difficult to, but just for the sake of argument) he/she would take 9 minutes or 540 seconds to produce that text. GT took less than 0.5s, which is 1000x faster. So as much as you can push a human translator, it's physically impossible to beat the speed of MT.

If that's really the case then I guess that there is no point in even trying. Too bad I was really hoping that if I get some professional translation software it could be done

You won't get a perfect translation, but you can come close. Human languages are not bijective so there is bound to be some loss. But you can get close enough, depending on how close you want "close enough" to be. Fujitsu wouldn't be able to put in the development effort and sell ATLAS at $1k+ if there wasn't the demand for it.

[LordBlane]

True, but it's impossible to do it with only a software when you don't know japanese. At least, you need to know a bit of the language that you want to translate.

[RusAnon]

It's not a misconception. Accuracy is less, but speed is several orders of magnitude higher.

Please note I've said "valid English", not "random pile of words that resemble English a bit if you don't try to read it". Yeah, you can get pile of words in no time, but you will spend MORE time trying to assemble something remotely sensible out of that junk than just doing literal word-by-word translation. Even with my crappy jp skills (around N3) it is true, and much more true for professional translators. I've seen some of them working in real time, they blaze through text faster than I could even read it alone.

Also, wikipedia and VN are completely different things, no idea why would you use it as example.

[Aggressor]

I agree with RusAnon. Try using machine TL on something at least Majikoi grade and you'll find yourself unable to desipher the tons of random garbage it'll throw at you.

[Guest]

rusanon when you mean "rest of the world" you really mean your super hardcore 4chan-esque communities.

normal people are not like that, they dont think like that. they just don't get emotional over it.

if they see rubbish english, or stuff start to not make sense, they will most likely close the game because it's not worth their time. They dont get emotional, and they wait for a better patch.

That is why I am very suspicious of the argument that people are scared of competing against machine translations. I don't see their quality as threatening to me at all. I can't see why proper TLers need to be so scared of them. The truth is, I think it has been played up on purpose for the lolz.

The truth is that the whole crying cold-blood murder over machineTLers, is because people are either having fun trolling, OR, they are extreme japanophiles who have bought into the 'sacredness of the JP language' bullshit, or they are worshippers of Japanese authors. These are the kind of people who tremble in awe when they are in the presence of one of these GODs.

Edited September 10, 2013 by Down
People insulting each others on the forum is a big no.

[garejei]

I doubt any good translator worth their salt would feel threatened by machine TLs. Besides, and I don't know how many people actually realize this, but translators aren't *just* translators. They're also writers to a certain extent. Translation isn't just word by word/phrase by phrase replacement of one language with another, sometimes you have to rephrase entire sentences and paragraphs to make the meaning come across more efficiently. I think at least a certain level of knowledge of the language is always going to be necessary for that.

Also, someone throw the below paragraph into a MTL software, I'm genuinely curious what it can make of it (I've never used ATLAS and the like so I'm wondering how accurate these programs are). This is what could be considered a relatively complex/difficult VN script:

この日の舞台は、計四幕。第一幕は、決闘であった。小さな村の手前の原。揃いの軍装を纏い、銃と軍刀で武装した兵が数十人、隊列を成している。戦気を漲らせながらも不気味に静寂を守るその様は、赤い夕日に照らされて、尚一層凶々しい。陣頭には見るも厳しい、厚い鎧姿の武士達が立つ。分厚い鉄甲、長大な太刀――彼らの醸し出す威圧感は、一騎のみでも背後の兵全てに優る戦力たり得るという事実を、何より雄弁に物語っている。今、村に向かって音声を響かせるのは、鎧士らの中でも筆頭らしき一人であった。物言いの傲りからも、彼がこの軍部隊を率いる長であることが知れる。

[RusAnon]

Besides, and I don't know how many people actually realize this, but translators aren't *just* translators. They're also writers to a certain extent.

True, although English is very forgiving language, unlike Russian, for example. Russian translations are plagued by people who know Japanese, but cannot write Russian prose properly and ruin text entirely.

Also, someone throw the below paragraph into a MTL software, I'm genuinely curious what it can make of it (I've never used ATLAS and the like so I'm wondering how accurate these programs are). This is what could be considered a relatively complex/difficult VN script:

この日の舞台は、計四幕。第一幕は、決闘であった。小さな村の手前の原。揃いの軍装を纏い、銃と軍刀で武装した兵が数十人、隊列を成している。戦気を漲らせながらも不気味に静寂を守るその様は、赤い夕日に照らされて、尚一層凶々しい。陣頭には見るも厳しい、厚い鎧姿の武士達が立つ。分厚い鉄甲、長大な太刀――彼らの醸し出す威圧感は、一騎のみでも背後の兵全てに優る戦力たり得るという事実を、何より雄弁に物語っている。今、村に向かって音声を響かせるのは、鎧士らの中でも筆頭らしき一人であった。物言いの傲りからも、彼がこの軍部隊を率いる長であることが知れる。

ATLAS:

The stage of this day, Four acts in total. The first act, The duel. Field in this side of small village. The battle dress of becoming complete is worn, Tens of soldiers who bear arms with gun and saberTens of soldiers who bear arms with gun and saber, The file has been done. The externals that eerily defend silence : though [tatakaki] is [**] [rase], It is compared with a red evening sun, Further [kyoukyou] [shii] . It is severe with [jintou] though sees, Samurais of thick [yoroisugata] stand. Thick [tetsukabuto], The overpowering feeling that long large sword ―― men cause, A war potential [tari] fact of obtaining it even only one [**] superior to all soldiers in the back, It eloquently tells it in above all. Now, Sounding the voice toward the village, It was one that seemed to be the first on the list in [yoroishi] person. From [**ri] of the objection, It can know length to which he leads this military corps.

Google Translate:

Stage of the day, a total of tetralogy. The first act was a duel. Original in front of the small village. Dozens of soldiers to the military dressed in matching, armed with swords and guns, and forms the ranks. Is like that to protect the eerily quiet, even while the war Minagira air, lit by red sunset, It should be noted that more ominous arbitrariness. See also tough to Jinto, warriors of thick armor-clad stand. Thick iron armor, a long sword - intimidating to bring the They are eloquent above all, a fact that can be the force that is better than all of the soldiers behind in only Ikki. Now, the voice sounded towards the village, it was one looked like among the largest armor the propeller. From the arrogance of protest against the decision, I have come out a long he led the military units.

But generally MTL is better with narration than dialogues, so its better to test on dialogues.

[Okami]

I doubt any good translator worth their salt would feel threatened by machine TLs. Besides, and I don't know how many people actually realize this, but translators aren't *just* translators. They're also writers to a certain extent. Translation isn't just word by word/phrase by phrase replacement of one language with another, sometimes you have to rephrase entire sentences and paragraphs to make the meaning come across more efficiently. I think at least a certain level of knowledge of the language is always going to be necessary for that.

Also, someone throw the below paragraph into a MTL software, I'm genuinely curious what it can make of it (I've never used ATLAS and the like so I'm wondering how accurate these programs are). This is what could be considered a relatively complex/difficult VN script:

この日の舞台は、計四幕。第一幕は、決闘であった。小さな村の手前の原。揃いの軍装を纏い、銃と軍刀で武装した兵が数十人、隊列を成している。戦気を漲らせながらも不気味に静寂を守るその様は、赤い夕日に照らされて、尚一層凶々しい。陣頭には見るも厳しい、厚い鎧姿の武士達が立つ。分厚い鉄甲、長大な太刀――彼らの醸し出す威圧感は、一騎のみでも背後の兵全てに優る戦力たり得るという事実を、何より雄弁に物語っている。今、村に向かって音声を響かせるのは、鎧士らの中でも筆頭らしき一人であった。物言いの傲りからも、彼がこの軍部隊を率いる長であることが知れる。

And here is wath Babylon give me when I throw that text in it:

Four as for the stage of this day in total. The first curtain was a duel. Hara just before the small village. I wear a matching combat uniform, and dozens of armed soldiers make a file in a gun and a saber. The state to protect quietness weirdly while letting you fill with round mind is lighted up by the red setting sun, and bad luck still forces it still more. Samurais dressed in a severe thick armor are made though I look in the head. I am eloquent above all, and, as for the thick iron armor, the feeling of tall and stout coercion that sword - - they bring on, war potential superior to all the soldiers of the rear tells even one horse man about a fact to be able to be enough. It was one who seemed to be the first on the list among armor people now that let a sound sound toward the village. From the arrogance of the how to speak, I can know that he is the head with these military authorities corps

Now how much correct is it?

[RusAnon]

Now how much correct is it?

Google one is quite close in most of sentences, so you can compare yourself.

[garejei]

There are tiny remnants of the original meaning here and there but those are mostly inaccurate/gibberish.

Edit: Btw, yeah, the Google one comes the closest.