A world of question marks and squiggly lines

Visual Novel Community Archive, 2000-2009
#1

Well, mostly we don’t speak/read or understand Japanese but if you’re asking how could we play the games, let me tell you: We use a little handy freeware namely AGTH to hook text from those games and then have a translation software auto-translate it, ATLAS is a popular one, although other translation softwares won’t hurt :wink:

By far this is the most popular way to play Japanese games, though not all of them can be played this way (text just can’t be hooked, etc etc…). But err… you should know what kind of quality to expect from an auto-translation tool, don’t you? Well, at least it’s better than Google Translate’s performance :lol:

Now i just feel tired each time i play a game this way :stuck_out_tongue:

#2

I am (in about a week) going to finish my 3rd semester of Japanese. I started taking Japanese literally as a direct result of wanting to play lots of JRPGs and hgames and so forth, and not knowing the language.

You can get almost nothing interesting out of an h-game without being able to understand what’s going on – the sex isn’t THAT good. To really get the most out of a game you really do need to be able to read the text.

#3

Yes, I speak and read some Japanese, but not enough to play an untranslated game yet. Neither of the options you give applies to me. I didn’t start taking formal classes until after I had started playing these games, but the games aren’t why I started learning. (Anime and manga also didn’t really factor in to my wanting to learn the language.) The reason I wanted to learn is in the secret I am only now revealing on this board, something I say with much pride: ???(romaji: Ore wa Sansei.)

#4

I have only the stubborn fangirl’s knowledge of japanese - which is to say that I can recognise a handful of words spoken, know a few katakana which is often enough to get you around a website or a game menu, and have piles of translation tools around me to try and make sense of things. I find JWPce to be quite useful. It’s no good at translating sentences, but you can look at various potential meanings of an individual kanji and do wildcard dictionary searches and often, if you’re stubborn enough, come up with a good guess for things that the proper translators can’t handle. Also, handy symbol tables with shift-JIS codes (needed if you’re hex-editing) and kanji lookup tables where you can attempt to find a completely unknown symbol (something you can’t paste, like a title grahpic) by strokes and shapes.

It requires a lot of stubbornness, and I can still only take vague guesses at what things mean.

#5

I only understand a few words in japanes since I hear them all the time in translated eroge (the voices are still in Japanese).
Of course I don’t think that it’s enough to have a deep conversation… except if in your daily life you only have to say iku… seki ippaÔ, yamete oniichan itaÔ, sugoÔ sempaÔ no chinchin (ah no sorry chin-beep-n), …

Atlas/adph works… sometimes (i don’t know why but it doesn’t work anymore since my last reboot).
I tried it with Sono Hanabira. The dialogues are really basic but even like that I can say that atlas sucks.

So… my plan is to earn 1 million $, buy PP and make them translate Konayuki Fururi, Cross Channel, … (I also need 1 more million $ to buy to japanese companies involved with those games).

#6

I’m about to finish my 5th semester of Japanese and I still don’t think I can play any untranslated games. There are just way too many words I don’t know. After a point it becomes more about learning vocab than anything else.

I wouldn’t play a game with ATLAS. It totally ruins the game. I don’t see how people can use that but complain about MG’s translation. MG’s translations are orders of magnitude better than what ATLAS can produce.

#7

True, sometime (if not many times) ATLAS just give me a vague meaning of the sentence, worse than MG’s translation. At least in MG’s case, it’s just mainly grammar errors, i can still make out some senses in every text block of Edelweiss.

#8

I just like to look at the cute pictures and hear the weird sounds (not voices, since I prefer my games unvoiced), trying to figure out what’s happening~ :smiley:

…also, I like mosaics!

…and concubines.

#9

Auto-translation is sufficient for me to play Princess Maker and figure that I know roughly what’s going on (most of the time) - the plot’s not exactly deep, there’s a lot of visual feedback, and scheduling choices are pretty obvious, especially with the english menu patch. But when it comes to the handful of vacation/dialog choices, I have to consult a guide written by someone with more of a clue, because there’s not enough context to figure out what the choices are!

A deep storyline with lots of meaningful choices, I wouldn’t even TRY playing it with auto-translators.

#10

I still can’t find my Windows XP install disk, so Japanese doesn’t display in games for me.

If it did, I’d use any means available to attempt to translate it since I understand only basic spoken dialog. Basic as in motto, hai, and a few others.

However, I do have a number of Japanese only games.

…yeah, I have them pretty much just for the sex scenes. I dream of a tool that would automatically translate them accurately and well.

#11

I don’t speak or read Japanese, but I have tried the Atlas route on several different games,
in some cases it works pretty well and you can get most of the story and make rational
choices, and in other cases the games are just totally unplayable. Which makes dropping
a hundred bucks on an import game really hard without knowing what you’re getting so I
have pretty much given up the idea.

I’ve always wanted to learn Japanese, and that’s not bred from these sort of games or
anime, I’ve always been facinated by the culture (which I’m sure inspired my interest
in the games) and I pondered the idea of double majoring in computer science and
Japanese language to work on localization of games . But the only school near me that
offered it closed down the year I was going to begin classes there…

#12

I learned Japanese to play eroges. I learned Japanese by playing eroges. =P

#13