A new way of playing Japanese and English games side-by-side (2016) | Hacker News Reader

A new way of playing Japanese and English games side-by-side (2016)

legendsoflocalization.com

68 pointscableshaft14 comments

Instant, in-software, translation is an amazing way to learn languages and I can't congratulate the author enough on his implementation. The Guild Wars MMO had a similar functionality built-in that allowed the player to press Ctrl to show the whole U.I in another language. When letting go it'd go back to the primary language. Don't know why they implemented that but it got me 80% of the way to fluency in English. I implemented something similar for the Kindle Reader and I use it often to learn Japanese and Korean.

If people have other examples of software with this functionality I'd love to hear about them.

Wow, I used to play guild wars! Cool to hear they were so ahead of their time!

Monster Hunter 4U (and possibly others) has triggered shoutouts (e.g., paraphrasing, "I'm jumping on the monster!" when you jump on the monster, "Oh no, I've been knocked out" when you get knocked out, etc) that show up in each player's own language.

Final Fantasy 14 has a series of dropdown chat menus, and handy tab-completion, that let you say words/vocab (like "White Mage") or phrases ("Let's queue for a dungeon!") that show up in players' own languages

> I implemented something similar for the Kindle Reader

Hey, that's awesome, do you have a github repo for the Kindle Reader change/companion app? I learn Chinese using Kindle and the native app experience for that is really terrible. I have to highlight lines I don't understand which takes a long press and selecting the start and end, copy them, then Google Translate pops up. After enough lines are copied, Kindle refuses to let you highlight more, so then I have to long press again and delete the line to avoid hitting that limit. Long press to see translation would be so much faster. I wish it was like desktop software where there's plenty of browser plugins to show you translations on mouse hover.

Do you have any notes or have you shared the implementation for Kindle Reader? I've been looking for similar things to pick up "UI"-fluency in other languages.

I wonder if this might have been a feature for testing that they figured "hey, why not expose to the end user?" Testers need to test text rendering/dimensions in different languages, but likely don't speak all of them, so they could navigate the menus in their native language and then switch to the language under test when they got to the right place.

For Japanese, I built a popular iOS app called Manabi Reader that has easy access to short-form native Japanese reading material and has one-gap access to seeing the English.

https://reader.manabi.io

Here's an article from the same site from last month showing additional progress that's been made on this tool, now called Wanderbar: https://legendsoflocalization.com/wanderbar/

Interesting concept. I only skimmed, so maybe the rationale is explained in the article, but I'm a bit surprised by the "reverse subtitle" design aspect. That is to say, rather than seeing the original language by default and getting some side-bar with translated text to help you over bumps, you play the translation with a gloss of the original text in a side bar. So by default you kinda need to put your eyes where the translated stuff is.

Isn't that noticeably less efficient if the aim is learning the original language?

A word by word replacement would be great. For example in an RPG, begin in all English but as you go on begin to slowly replace common words (with explanations as necessary); then later begin to fix grammar and sentence structure.

I recently read Shogun and it's pretty interesting how you pick up a few bits of the language here and there.

For those who aren't familiar with the author, Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin is one of the most well-known video game fan translators. He's probably most famous for being the lead for the Mother 3 fan translation, and last I heard was working officially as a translator for Nintendo.

This hit a happy comfy sweet spot. The right level of hack for me. Fighting randomness, iterative development, and unique solutions (create your own enemy names from attributes). Very organic development. One of those 'sum is greater than the parts' efforts.

I wonder what kind of effort went into fitting the dialog into just 182 kanji, I suppose a lot of words were in kana that would not otherwise be.

I think I read somewhere people already developed a new ML system to live translation in-game text, but forgot where.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com