So I was taking a looksee at the japanese games linked here and decided to give ztranslate a try, since translator++ doesn’t translate everything depending on the project is coded. Unfortunately, ztranslate hasn’t had any notable improvements and only has a small translation space, which means several elements have been cropped which ruins the context of sentences.
Luckily, after looking up some guides, this was the best one so far:
Not only does this have a readjustable “lens” for tuning the translation, it leaves the original text alone so you can double check with a dictionary. As for the downsides, you’ll have to drag the capture window over since it doesn’t do well inspecting every element in the window, misclicks may cause you to skip content, and fullscreen is impossible since you need both windows simultaneously. Using google translate like this also may invade user privacy, but that’s a drop in the bucket at this point. Overall I’m really impressed, because this can be used on any software without too much overhead, and even used on webpages if dropping the webpage link doesn’t work.
Has anyone else found a silver bullet to machine translation lately?
I’ve read complete VNs with Textractor, and that’s what I use when I need to catch difficult kanji in something that I’d otherwise need to hack open. I wouldn’t call it a silver bullet and it does require windowed screens, but it captures the text in real time and keeps scrollable log of everything displayed.
However, Textractor (or at least the version I have) doesn’t work with RPG Maker VX Ace for whatever reason. It’s not too big a deal in this context due to there being no VX Ace WG games as far as I know.
By the way, which WG-relevant games still need to be translated? I try and keep on top of the RPG Maker games out of Japan.
This service you’ve found seems like a pretty convenient ultimate fallback since it can be applied to anything without limit, but as you say, it’s pretty invasive to the user experience, and worse IMO, it can’t be used to create a replicable final translated product.
Your “silver bullet” is to ideally not rely on MTL at all; it’s fundamentally a poor substitute for the intended experience. Of course, in cases like that applet the video was showing off, you’ve no choice in the matter, but if it’s an RPGMaker game or a hookable VN, you should aim to make it a community project and get an actual translator to go through the lines one by one (and in that case translator++ is probably still your best bet). There’s a handful of people on this forum willing and able, myself included. It’s the only real way to handle context-dependent lines.
I know you got a good point there given your great work on Feeder Fantasy, but seeing as the laundry list of games isn’t getting any smaller, and this was just an experiment of mine to see if an average person could break through the barrier. Ideally, the community should polish up the work once interest is developed, but only a few here actually have the skill to pass through without trial and error. Aside from handing out Japanese dictionaries like bibles, this was the closest solution I could think of, and it could help beginners actually process and apply with original context, unlike translator++ which guts out the text.
Maybe someday there’ll be a better tutorial for Japanese that solves this, until then MTL lets translators work on the hard hits while the experimental games get analyzed without wasting effort. Not to mention, not all games are RPGMaker with guttable code, and stuff like Two Beast or Not To Beast has no other alternative.
