Swordmaster wrote:
Wildbill, you noted this to akualung on Issue #0000589:
"I wasn't sure about the semi-colon in the first graphic either. I'm open to suggestions for better ways to convey instructions. This is the Japanese:
「エ~ ゴホン
; ここからは 2つのパーティーの
; 協力なしでは ぬけられんぞ…
; Yボタンで 2つのパーティーを
; 切りかえて進むのじゃ よいな…"
Curiosity got the better of me, so I gave it an amateur shot using Google Translate (lol). I hope you don't mind if I post this...
Ok, Google Translate gave me this:
"From here you can not go without cooperation of the two parties ...
You can switch between the two parties with Y button ..."
Which I then remodeled into:
"From here you must use 2 cooperating parties.
Use the Y button to switch between them."
What do you think? That was fun. Language (especially Japanese) is so fascinating to me! I see translation as a very interesting puzzle.
Now that you've played that shadow world and understand what you must do, the raw machine translation makes more sense. Try untangling similar puzzles 10,000 times, and you have just translated yourself a whole RPG!
Five years ago, the phrase "machine translations" was almost "dirty talk" in this hobby, but something I've discovered recently is that the "machine" is much more accurate (in many cases) these days than ever before. When I first started trying my hand at translating 20 years ago, I used several Japanese dictionary hard copy books, along with Jim Breen's online dictionary that was hosted at a college website in Australia. Today, I'm finding that when I re-translate a string that a tester finds confusing, sometimes I'm getting better results in the machine that I did three years and even six months ago - especially RPG terminology. This may be due to users constantly submitting "better" translations online.
Another function I carry out frequently is translating whole Japanese websites. Once I've read three or four accounts of how to crack a certain puzzle to reach a magic mirror in mountain cave, the light usually comes on. Once I actually have the mirror in my pack, I know exactly what I didn't "get" earlier, regarding a clue back in town or from a Japanese player's FAQ paragraph. Suddenly, all of the scattered bits and pieces form into a picture or pattern - weeding out the fluff - and a whole result appears obvious, after-the-fact.
Last, but not least, I run searches on item names, inputting the actual Kana/Kanji, and sometimes a photograph of the specific item or it's namesake will pop up at a translated Japanese website. Occasionally, I will learn that an item is named after a cultural symbol or features that the machine will never recognize, such as the "Ceramic Urn armor" for character "Urnie" in SSMS-II. Instead of using the actual Japanese word for "ceramic", the writer picked the name of a company that manufactures fine ceramics. It would be like us naming Cinderella's ballroom shoes "Waterford Slippers" instead of crystal or glass slippers.
Yes, being as thorough as possible is all very time-consuming but worth it. I could have left that urn with the name I stuck on it three years ago "Fancy Urn" (or whatever it was), but "ceramic" is accurate. So, this is what makes translating a grueling experience for me, unless I have a partner such as Hausen who recognizes real people and occurrences in a culture and history such as China's, in which the weird Japanese nomenclature for many situations makes sense only to Japanese speakers and will never translate accurately in a machine (at least not consistently), even after checking the "alternate" readings.
Okay, on another PC, I will now go see how ("From here, you must use 2 cooperating parties. Use the Y button to switch between them.") compares to what I have already entered in that string. I can't work on SSMS-II in a 64-bit Windows 10 environment (where I am right now) because Bongo`'s insertion program crashes. That's because he wrote part of it in DOS, that runs in Windows 7/Vista/XP 32-bit just fine, hee-hee...! Fortunately, I still have a few "dinosaur" PCs on standby as backups!