I'm gonna be that guy and bump for translation. It's been sitting here for a week now and i really wanna read it >:(
In one whole week, you could most likely have translated it yourself, whether you don't speak a single word of Japanese or do.
Your computer should as a standard have a Character Map, where you will find all of the symbols available to you. Japanese symbols are commonly found in the font list MS Mincho and MS Gothic. If I want something translated, I look at the image and match up the Hiragana or Katakana symbols with the symbols in the Character Map app.
For Kanji symbols, it is a little more complicated. You can still find these in your Character Map, but there are over 4000 so, normally, a person would not wish to go through the list each time. Instead, I recommend you go to Kanji.Sljfaq where you can draw the symbol the best you can and see if the site suggests the correct symbol, or build the symbol from the Multiradical menu, so you can copy the symbol and paste it to your other symbols.
Once you have found all the letter symbols for a page, or as much as you can muster for the moment, go to text translation sites. Google Translate and Babelfish are decent, but not perfect. I recommend using both, to verify your translations. Paste your symbols there, but be prepared that direct translations rarely exists and quite often, you might end up with utter nonsense! Should this happen, try to divide up the sentences to better help understand the words that are being said and INTERPRET the dialogue the best you can. Write you suggestion on a Translation Note and check off the [Check Translation] ballot box if you are unsure and feel someone else can make a better interpretation.
This is what I do when I find something, usually old and forgotten, that I want to read. Good luck and have fun if you try it out, yourself!
I agree with the part about machine translations being utter nonsense, at least, but if through blood and sweat you can make them work, then... good for you. Adding machine translations or other "suggestions" as notes on DB is highly discouraged though.
Adding machine translations or other "suggestions" as notes on DB is highly discouraged though.
hence the reason I wrote "INTERPRET the dialogue" in capital INTERPRET. Copy/Pasting anything straight out of free online translators would be embarrassingly bad.
I keep my old text files for translating stuff I'm curious about. One of the lines being directly translated through Google, ends up like this.
Alright, since it didn't look like anyone else was going to translate this, I gave it my best shot. I don't actually know any Japanese, so a lot of the nuance of the language probably got completely obliterated in my translation.
I used a combination of google translate, jisho.org, weblio.jp, and some Japanese OCR software. I got most of it, but there's still some parts I couldn't translate. I'll return to this on the weekend to see if I can finish. Also, if anyone could check the translation that would be awesome.
Alright, since it didn't look like anyone else was going to translate this, I gave it my best shot. I don't actually know any Japanese, so a lot of the nuance of the language probably got completely obliterated in my translation.
I used a combination of google translate, jisho.org, weblio.jp, and some Japanese OCR software. I got most of it, but there's still some parts I couldn't translate. I'll return to this on the weekend to see if I can finish. Also, if anyone could check the translation that would be awesome.
If you want to get serious about translating, there are some good websites for learning how to translate. Tae Kim's guide is a good free online source to have on hand to reference some aspects of grammar. It's also helpful to just plain Google specific phrases with something like "meaning of あかん" as a search term when machine translations give you obvious rubbish. One thing you really want to get down (that machine translation generally fails to understand) is how particles work.
Beyond that, rather than going through character maps, Google Translate has a little box you can draw kanji into, which is easy for even beginners to transcribe things. When you get more used to recognizing radicals, try using slfjfaq. You can find hiragana and katakana should probably just be memorized. I printed those out, kept them on my computer desk, and just manually checked them until I memorized them. You start to recognize things much more quickly when you can at least read the hiragana. (And type them into Google Translate next to the kanji you will still likely need to draw.)
I would also recommend getting Rikaichan, which can be especially useful when looking at things like commentaries where you can just click-and-drag to copy the text. A good way to start is to just write out everything in Google Translate, then use Rikaichan to look at how it translates things differently from Google Translate.
The Jaded Network is a good source for onomatopoeia and sound effects, as well. It also works just using the English equivalents and using only the first few characters. (I.E. you can search for "ka" instead of "カー".)
A good way to practice is to just go back to a pool you enjoy, click to turn the existing translations off, then do some translations yourself. Then, you have the existing translations as a way of checking your work.
Wow, thanks for all the advice! And thanks for finishing this. Seriously, you're awesome. It's also nice to know most of my translations weren't too far off.
I definitely intend to translate more stuff in the future, but hopefully not until I learn more of the grammar.
Wow, thanks for all the advice! And thanks for finishing this. Seriously, you're awesome. It's also nice to know most of my translations weren't too far off.
I definitely intend to translate more stuff in the future, but hopefully not until I learn more of the grammar.
Oh, and speaking of which, it's covered a bit in that "grammar of Japanese sentences" link, but you also want to be able to recognize sentence-ending words. Several of Reimu's sentences continue through different speech bubbles (and through different pages), and that's clear because of the way the sentence wasn't completed. You want to be able to recognize the likes of よ or the 'classic' です, since punctuation is pretty much optional in Japanese. (As is, frustratingly, actually specifying the sentence subject, which is frequently a stumbling block of mine.)
