A good Machine Translator?

[ittaku]

You forgot we could just breed some babel fish.

[EdwardWongHPTIV]

8 minutes ago, ittaku said:

You forgot we could just breed some babel fish.

Now you're just being silly.

[Amano Sora]

I tried readin Yakimochi Stream W/ a translator and had a hiragana chart w/ dictionaries open in tabs. was time consuming but fun lol. I can understand quite a bit, but readin kanji is the problem. W/e Ill just keep doin what ive been doin.

[sanahtlig]

6 minutes ago, Amano Sora said:

I can understand quite a bit, but readin kanji is the problem.

Then why are you even asking about machine translators?  Text hook with tools like Interactive Text Hooker, display furigana with tools like Translation Aggregator, and parse the words for lookup using JParser.  It'll be much faster than what you were doing and you'll get much higher comprehension than with a machine translator.

[Kanbe]

Only plebs use tools

[Arcadeotic]

Eh, good Machine Translators don't really exist

I'd say use either TA with Chiitrans or TA with Jedict and Mecab

If you really want a Machine Translator, use ATLAS

[Clephas]

The only good machine translation is no machine translation.

[BookwormOtaku]

If a good machine translator ever is made I wonder how long it'll take for it to go HAL 9000/Skynet/Ultron on us for mainly using it to translate porn

[Bolverk]

You can get a better than any current machine TL by simply putting in a few dozens hours into studying jp, then reading vns with dictionaries for a few months. Machine translators are that shit.

[Okarin]

4 hours ago, Clephas said:

The only good machine translation is no machine translation.

Pretty much like nuclear war... as seen in "War games"

[Clephas]

To clarify based on brief personal experience (like once, the first time I tested the waters with TA and AGTH) actual machine translation in the sense of leaving all interpretation (beyond single words) to ATLUS, Google Translate, etc. just doesn't work.  English doesn't translate well into Japanese and the reverse is doubly true.  Japanese is a heavily nuanced language, and those machine translators are horrible at picking up nuance at all.

If you do have basic Japanese grammatical knowledge, it is quite possible to puzzle out an untranslated VN just using TA's Jparser with edict installed...  just set the furigana to romaji or hiragana (depending on which is easier for you) and use your mouse to highlight words you don't understand right off the bat (in most cases, it will bring up a bunch of candidates for the meaning). 

Edit: That's also why translations in general get bashed no matter what... there are very few translations that can really be considered 'good', because Japanese just doesn't translate into English very well without losing most of the nuances... 

[Scorp]

Machine translation is very good thing, when you want to laugh hysterically after encountering something like "and after I braced myself, demons went to ride primarily and directly on me".

Anyway, for a short nukige I think machine translation could be ok to understand the cause why he decided to fuck her in the ass and not somewhere else That's why everyone here read eroge, right?

[Amano Sora]

11 hours ago, sanahtlig said:

Then why are you even asking about machine translators?  Text hook with tools like Interactive Text Hooker, display furigana with tools like Translation Aggregator, and parse the words for lookup using JParser.  It'll be much faster than what you were doing and you'll get much higher comprehension than with a machine translator.

Readin is the Prob. The voiced dialogue is alright. If i dont understand some of the narration i feel like im missin out.

[Tawm]

By the sound of it, you already know basic grammar. There should be nothing stopping you from using the methods mentioned above to read basic untranslated VNs. It's a very useful way of expanding your vocabulary and getting further grammar practice. One of the best, actually. I don't recommend reading anything you'll want to enjoy one day with better comprehension, though. Additionally, you should fire up Anki and work your way through the Core 2k/6k deck alongside whatever you decide to read. Japanese is not the insurmountable mountain it seems to be.

[Nagisa_Fawkes]

I also created a Machine Translation thread, veeeery long ago...
I gave up on that, and went down the "Learn Japanese" way. Trust me, very worth it.

[ChaosRaven]

Translation Aggregator can work quite decently in combination with Atlas if you know how to setup a title properly, as long as the title doesn't use too difficult Japanese.

One of the biggest problems for the machine translators are usually the names, because those are often not clearly distinguishable from normal words. Especially my personal favorites - one-kanji names like 歩 (Ayumu) from Hoshizora e Kakaru Hashi which is used in the very common word 歩くfor walk. You really don't wanna know what fairy tales Atlas can create out of sentences with this name... 

However, you can increase the translation accuracy quite a bit by preparing a name table for Translation Aggregator. That's usually the first thing I do before I start a new Japanese VN. It's also very helpful for weird katakana constructs if the VN is written in extra-cool Japanese where every second word is an English word written in katakana.

The table below is an example of a name table I used when playing Hoshizora e Kakaru Hashi. And if you still don't understand a sentence you use JParser to look up the word. And the more you read the easier it will get.

Spoiler

*------------------
*Hoshizora e Kakaru Hashi
*------------------
星野    Hoshino
一馬    Kazuma
かずま    Kazuma
カズくん    Kazuくん
歩くん    Ayumuくん
南国原    Minamikokubaru
大吾    Daigo
ダイゴ    Daigo
藤堂    Toudou
かさね    Kasane
こより    Kojori
つむぎ    Tsumugi
万ちゃん    Jorozu-Chan
万さん    Jorozu-San
千歌    Senka
神本    Koumoto
円佳    Madoka
酒井    Sakai
陽菜    Hina
日向    Hinata
伊吹    Ibuki
中津川    Nakatsugawa
初ちゃん    Ui-Chan
初さん    Ui-San
七森    Nanamori
星羅    Seira
よっちゃん    Yocchan
長瀬湊    NagaseMinato
長瀬    Nagase
*Yamabaki
山比古    Yamahifuru

 

Though I'm currently using Chiitrans myself where I add the names on the fly because I don't get the text dropping problems between ITH and TA under control.

[Bolverk]

7 hours ago, Tawm said:

I don't recommend reading anything you'll want to enjoy one day with better comprehension, though.

I think this is a really bad advice honestly. It's more important to read something you enjoy. You are bound to miss some stuff your first time around. Reading something you don't like or reading something really easy might seem like a good idea. But it will make the reading experience horrible. It's outright horrible to read say a moege slowly when you don't like them in the first place.

Read something you are motivated to read. But keep the language a manageable level of difficulty. Finally there are more good jp vns around to read than most of us will have time to read regardless.

[Tyr]

On 2016/3/9 at 9:03 AM, BookwormOtaku said:

If a good machine translator ever is made I wonder how long it'll take for it to go HAL 9000/Skynet/Ultron on us for mainly using it to translate porn

ATLAS is a good machine translator. LEC is also pretty capable.

When ATLAS was released it was state of the art. Sophisticated parsing algorithms, complex dictionaries, many options to configure. It's sad that it doesn't really get updated anymore, but it's still a very good tool.

I really don't know what people are expecting when they use a machine translator... magic? Are those people also believing that one day we will be enslaved by an artificial intelligence? Sorry, but that is Science Fiction (with an emphasis on fiction), just like a machine translator who can translate like a human could. This will never happen. It's simply not possible.

ATLAS is pretty good. It wont get much better than this. Don't blame the software for not living up to unrealistic expectations.

 

20 hours ago, ChaosRaven said:

Though I'm currently using Chiitrans myself where I add the names on the fly because I don't get the text dropping problems between ITH and TA under control.

What do you mean?

[Tyr]

On 2016/3/8 at 11:53 PM, 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.

I'm interested in hooking some Chinese RPGs. Is there a good machine translator for Chinese like ATLAS is for Japanese?

[aristotll]

On 2016/3/8 at 6:53 AM, 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.

Many Chinese TL works are very bad.