- Sep 26, 2019
- 1,015
- 2,169
There are only so many novels that fans and companies can translate per year, there are a plethora of very interesting visual novels out there that are quite good but will simply remain in Japanese and seemingly no amount of begging will change that. So, I decided to try something.
I downloaded and barely learned how a machine translator worked, it machine translates each line as they come up, they tend to be quite to bad, they tend to struggle most with pronouns, or who is saying/doing what. However, there is plenty of context and since VNs tend to be one-on-one or one-on-two conversations, it is easy to figure out. Most likely due to how Japanese is written, there are very few pronouns in Japanese, so most dialogue relies on context to figure out who they are speaking about, once you get used to that way of interpretation it becomes simpler to follow along.
while you won't get a perfect one-to-one translation, between the voice acting and the rough translation, it is quite easy to get a general idea of what is going on and enjoy the story, which in my opinion is better than never being able to read it.
Once you get used to it, it becomes a bit easier to enjoy the story. The only major drawbacks that are left by the time you're used to it are:
What do you guys think?
I downloaded and barely learned how a machine translator worked, it machine translates each line as they come up, they tend to be quite to bad, they tend to struggle most with pronouns, or who is saying/doing what. However, there is plenty of context and since VNs tend to be one-on-one or one-on-two conversations, it is easy to figure out. Most likely due to how Japanese is written, there are very few pronouns in Japanese, so most dialogue relies on context to figure out who they are speaking about, once you get used to that way of interpretation it becomes simpler to follow along.
while you won't get a perfect one-to-one translation, between the voice acting and the rough translation, it is quite easy to get a general idea of what is going on and enjoy the story, which in my opinion is better than never being able to read it.
Once you get used to it, it becomes a bit easier to enjoy the story. The only major drawbacks that are left by the time you're used to it are:
- Choices remain untranslated, so you basically have to use
You must be registered to see the linksand hirigana/katakana chart with a translator to figure out the two choices.
- It struggles with proper names, and some of the stuff it comes up with can make reading difficult, for example, one of the worst translated Emilia as "clothing Misako"
- Not every game works with it, the program has to "hook" the text in order to translate, this doesn't work every time and the program will never be able to translate it
- It cannot translate menus, but since 90% of menus have the same basic options, and the main menu is always laid out the same "new game>load>configure>extras>exit" it's pretty easy to get a rough idea of what you're doing(turning off background music and increasing text speed to max) simply by intuition
- Not every game works on windows 10.
- Finding copies of the game to download is a struggle and sometimes involves rather shady sites.
- Most games come as an ISO, so you need to mount and install, but I have a separate hard drive just for anime that I keep them in, however, a few files do sometimes bleed over to my main OS drive.
What do you guys think?
Last edited:
