Should i try translating VN's like this?

[zoom909]

I vote for the Babylon one

"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 admit it, that really does fire up my imagination. If I took enough cough syrup, I think I could write like that

[garejei]

Yeah, well it's pretty... uh, flamboyant, that much I admit. I'll totally remember this the next time bad luck forces my mind to light up by the red setting sun.

Bottom line, MTL crashes and burns when it comes to Japanese of this level. Not even pro editing skills could help you salvage the original meaning from those machine translations. And even if by some miracle you somehow could, at that point it'd actually be faster to just have someone who knows Japanese translate it from scratch the old fashioned way. MTL might be a semi-viable option with easy moege, but that's about it...

[Steve]

MTL might be a semi-viable option with easy moege, but that's about it...

Actually moege will probably be much harder to translate for something like Atlas than some Japanese instruction manual. MTL works if the original JP is grammatically correct, such as in those manuals or official documentation and such. But in moege especially, there is lot of informal Japanese, tons of speech patterns and mistakes in speech (from shyness and such) so its much harder than that.

I would say its actually better to learn Japanese sentence grammar and then translate word by word with machine and trying to edit it together. Which could be possible... but it would take much longer than it takes to a normal japanese reading translator and still it also isn't perfect.

[zoom909]

Yea, it doesn't work for moe games either.

I gave it this sentence.

以前、地球に来た理由を聞いたとき、彼女は今は話せないと言った。

Of which my quick TL would be:

"Previously, when I asked her reason for coming to earth, she said she couldn't tell me then."

Google xlate gave me this junk:

"Said when the previous, I heard the reason for coming to earth, she would not speak now."

See, the computer couldn't even tell from the context the difference between "ask" and "hear". That's critical for English. And it doesn't know when to use "speak" and when to use "tell".

But worse than that, the result is a garbled sentence. What in the world does "Said when the previous" mean?? I can see where it's getting sort of close, but I'm sorry...this is a technology which is still unusable right now.

Edited September 9, 2013 by zoom909

[garejei]

Steve: Now that you mention it, yeah that could very well be true. All the super colloquial "student speech", shortened sentences, jokes, puns, and God knows what else could easily cripple a software that can't even fully handle the kind of sentence zoom posted (which really is a basic N4-5-ish sentence, by the way...)

[shcboomer]

Actually moege will probably be much harder to translate for something like Atlas than some Japanese instruction manual. MTL works if the original JP is grammatically correct, such as in those manuals or official documentation and such. But in moege especially, there is lot of informal Japanese, tons of speech patterns and mistakes in speech (from shyness and such) so its much harder than that.

I would say its actually better to learn Japanese sentence grammar and then translate word by word with machine and trying to edit it together. Which could be possible... but it would take much longer than it takes to a normal japanese reading translator and still it also isn't perfect.

That is basically correct, it will suffer in that sense. There are a lot of colloquial terms and slang used in moege. Let's not even go into the informal Japanese and speech patterns. Although, I think the biggest thing that will hurt a MTL is any type of dialect such as Kansai which is used quite a bit in VNs.

[Wahfuu]

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.

How dare people respect the work and writing of the original text. Everyone shoud just bow their head to the supreme machine TL overlords and we can all start taking up the gibbershit language so we can comprehend what crap they are going to put out.

Machine TL's can be comprehendable sometimes, sure, but that doesn't mean it captures the writing style, meaning and essence the original text carried with it. Sorry, VN's are not just porn and deserve to be treated with a bit of respect.

Translation is more than just copy pasting words with a different fucking alphabet.

[Guest]

How dare people respect the work and writing of the original text. Everyone shoud just bow their head to the supreme machine TL overlords and we can all start taking up the gibbershit language so we can comprehend what crap they are going to put out.

Machine TL's can be comprehendable sometimes, sure, but that doesn't mean it captures the writing style, meaning and essence the original text carried with it. Sorry, VN's are not just porn and deserve to be treated with a bit of respect.

Translation is more than just copy pasting words with a different fucking alphabet.

This is exactly why i think people are stretching it. I don't agree that machine TLs should even be called actual translations at all, they are really just desperate-measure, last resort, word-to-word transliterators. yes they are terrible, and i don't agree with using them in proper translations to smooth over your poor knowledge of the language. but I don't think you can make this kind of leap so quickly to disrespecting the VN. (what does disrespecting the VN even mean? you mean disrespecting the author?)
because it's skipping a step, only if the machine TLer claims the work is an accurate representation of the original work, then can you say there has been disrespect. because it causes the user to think that she is reading the original JP author's writing (which she is not anyway), which causes her to think that the Japanese author wrote lousily. And so it paints the original JP author in a worser light than they actually are.
But when I was reading Maria-sama ga miteru on Baka-tsuki a long time ago, the writing was terrible! this was way back when i still couldn't read japanese yet, and in this "translation", the sentences not only were they grammatically wrong, but the sentences together made no sense, sentence A and sentence B don't follow. It may have been a machine TL, I wouldn't know. But What I knew was that this was not the original JP's writing. I am not reading the original JP author's work. It was clearly a lousy fan patch made by some guy (say from Indonesia) who ran his copy through an algorithm then published it.

That is why it is only an issue if the 'patch releaser' paints their patch in a way as to imply that this is a proper translation of the original, and even when they do, it is only minor problem because it does not take a reader more than a 100 lines before they realize something is wrong.

Secondly, because if it is a poor piece of work, then no one will share them.
And even if there are sharers, the sharer will most likely label them properly as to not mislead their 'sharees'. (except Ivan who insists on applying the extra work to strip the patches off all attribution, meaning no1 knows where or who they are from)

[REtransInternational]

Aaeru, as much as you are against the old culture and we are discussing a controversial topic here, let's not have this turn into personal insults against our members (at least in public ) despite your disagreement with them... or the pro-MT faction will look just as "4chan-esque".

That test paragraph highlights very well the difference between rMT and sMT, you can see that when rMT fails it's really obvious:

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.

It looks like either the dictionary is inadequate or the engine can't find a matching rule to parse, and is defaulting into just romanising the input until it can find something it can recognise again. sMT has a "softer" failure mode, because of how it works you get pieces of sentences from training data that are just concatenated:

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.

Babylon looks like sMT too, or possibly a hybrid. But if you said that was "difficult" Japanese, then it's not surprising; MT developers will be optimising for the common cases, which for VNTL means letting MT do the easy sentences and leaving human translators to figure out the hard ones. There are probably lots of very simple phrases that MT can handle perfectly fine already and occur with such frequency in the script (e.g. "good morning", "wake up", "the weather is good today", "thank you", etc.) that to have to input them over and over is not very productive.

Yea, it doesn't work for moe games either.

I gave it this sentence.

以前、地球に来た理由を聞いたとき、彼女は今は話せないと言った。

Of which my quick TL would be:

"Previously, when I asked her reason for coming to earth, she said she couldn't tell me then."

Google xlate gave me this junk:

"Said when the previous, I heard the reason for coming to earth, she would not speak now."

See, the computer couldn't even tell from the context the difference between "ask" and "hear". That's critical for English. And it doesn't know when to use "speak" and when to use "tell".

But worse than that, the result is a garbled sentence. What in the world does "Said when the previous" mean?? I can see where it's getting sort of close, but I'm sorry...this is a technology which is still unusable right now.

Honyaku

When I heard the reason that came to the earth before, I said that she could not talk now.

FreeTranslation

She said that she is not able to speak now, when she asked the reason that came of the earth, before.

You make a very good point regarding context, but if you only give one sentence as input, there is no much context for the engine to work from even if it could. (GT does use context in a limited way; the same sentence may get a different translation if preceeded by different input in the same submission). Being able to use context is one thing that is crucial for MT of Japanese (subject/object/topic detection, etc.), so it's somewhat surprising commercial engines like ATLAS don't seem to have this feature explicitly. One potential avenue for exploration here is to add a back-end to something like JParser/MeCab to output (at first, only fragments of) English, it could lead to something better than what's available today.

[RusAnon]

There are probably lots of very simple phrases that MT can handle perfectly fine already and occur with such frequency in the script (e.g. "good morning", "wake up", "the weather is good today", "thank you", etc.) that to have to input them over and over is not very productive.

I've made similar assumptions, esp. about h-scenes, and past two months was testing some statistical linguistics methods on my VN text corpus, but turned out its not true. Even simple 2-gram/3-gram frequency dictionaries show that simple, repeated sentences make up less than 5% of given VN.

Overall its just not worth the effort to try augmenting manual translation with machine beyond usual dictionary integration.

But anyway, this is already out of scope of initial subject — whether someone who doesn't know japanese at all could produce passable translation by only editing MTL results, and answer is obviously no.

[Okami]

I feel like I need to apologize to members of Fuwanovel for creating this topic, as it created quite the unpleasant disagreements. That really wasn't my intention as I truly didn't know if it is possible to do a good job this way or not. And I just wanted to help in translating VNs as I want to bring more of good VNs available to the western people who don't know Japanese like myself.

[shcboomer]

I feel like I need to apologize to members of Fuwanovel for creating this topic, as it created quite the unpleasant disagreements. That really wasn't my intention as I truly didn't know if it is possible to do a good job this way or not. And I just wanted to help in translating VNs as I want to bring more of good VNs available to the western people who don't know Japanese like myself.

No worries, these things happen regardless of the intention. I'm glad to see that people are into VNs enough to at least ask.

[zoom909]

FreeTranslation

She said that she is not able to speak now, when she asked the reason that came of the earth, before.

You make a very good point regarding context, but if you only give one sentence as input, there is no much context for the engine to work from even if it could.

That is even worse, in a sense, than Google's; because the correct grammar may the would-be TLer into thinking the computer has translated it correctly.

Also, a human can tell the context just from 1 sentence, in that case, because he can apply his power of reasoning. She wouldn't tell him back then, so therefore he could not have "heard" but had to have "asked" (and was replied to negatively).

As far as Aaeru I don't even know what she's trying to get at because of course this isn't a moral question. When it comes to VNs, I can think of several moral questions that arise, but this is just a question of good quality vs bad. I doubt that when the poster asked this question he was saying "should" in a moral sense...

I also don't know why the opening poster would apologise. It's a good discussion. Not his fault that some people decide to make it personal.

Edited September 10, 2013 by zoom909

[Steve]

I feel like I need to apologize to members of Fuwanovel for creating this topic, as it created quite the unpleasant disagreements. That really wasn't my intention as I truly didn't know if it is possible to do a good job this way or not. And I just wanted to help in translating VNs as I want to bring more of good VNs available to the western people who don't know Japanese like myself.

I also don't know why the opening poster would apologise. It's a good discussion. Not his fault that some people decide to make it personal.

Yes, it isn't your fault Okami, it just happened to open some old wounds that should have been left closed, but its more fault of the people bringing those matters up.

I still believe RusAnon didn't mean the post about Aaeru the way she interpreted it but I will leave it to those 2 to talk it out, seems to be more like big misunderstanding than anything else.

As for the topic of the discussion, it is a valid one and can be discussed so there is nothing wrong with that.

[solidbatman]

Alright. This got out of hand. My apologies Okami. I'll be closing this topic and if anyone is still interested in fussing, feel free to open a new topic.