What translator you guys use?

[Grandork]

Hey all, as most of you know, Translation Aggregator is having some serious issues ATM, thus I began using ChiiTrans. So far so good. Now, what translator have you guys been using?

I've always used Google, since they were said to be investing a lot of money on a really good machine translation, but, for the heck of it, I decided to try out all the other translators, and to my surprise I found that I liked Microsoft's translation better than Google's

Here's a little preview of what I saw:

わかった！でも、それって本来パパの仕事じゃ･･･
Google: Was found ! But , 's original work of Papa What it ...
Microsoft: I got it! But it's true dad work...

・・・・・いや、いっ今パパは手が離せない案件を抱えてんだ！　作業場の監督なんかよりずっと大事なんだよ！いや～忙しい忙しい！手が離せない！大変だ！
Google: ... Well , now Daddy 've got to face the projects tied up and say ! I do important than something much supervision of the workplace ! No, busy busy ~! It is not tied up ! It's hard !
Microsoft: ...　No, not gone now daddy's own idiotic issues tied up! I'm Director of something much more important than! No busy busy! Tied up! It's tough!

So I figured, hey, what if there are even better translators out there that I don't know. Thus I come to ask ya'll, what translator do you guys use?

 

[defcab]

Re: What translator you guys use?

They're all kinda terrible. Just use everything at once to increase the chances of getting something that makes a bit of sense.

Alternatively, spend some time learning hiragana, katakana, and the structure of Japanese grammar. If you get comfortable with that then you can understand most sentences by briefly hovering over each word with JParser/Mecab.
This has the added side-effect of learning Japanese while playing, though your vocabulary might end up slightly skewed.
I started doing this a few years ago, and now I'm probably on about the same level as a 7 year old. Though I know plenty of words that a 7-year old probably shouldn't...

 

[OfficerTJHooker]

Re: What translator you guys use?

By Microsoft, do you mean Bing? I might give that a shot if you're vouching for it.

Currently I just use ATLAS for main translations, since you can tune it so the translations it turns out are a bit more manageable. where I mostly defer to it when I'm too lazy to read through an entire paragraph myself or there are too many complex kanji in it.

Seriously though, it's worth learning hiragana and katakana.

 

[Grandork]

Re: What translator you guys use?

I did learn Katakana and Hiragana, I also learned the grammatical structure, both are really easy to learn if you already know more than a single language and aren't that big on strict grammatical structure. The problem was Kanji, my memory for details is horrendous, while my memory for broad stuff is excellent (I can easily remember what caused something and it's ramifications, but I have an extremely hard time remembering dates and names), thus, making learning 2k+ Kanji something that I'm not willing to do. I mean... Come on, there is NO reason why those things should exist, it's a useless barrier -.-

 

[KHTA]

Re: What translator you guys use?

My version of TA won't connect to Google anymore so I've been using Honyaku + Excite. Honyaku is pretty good cause they usually give a far better sentence structure than the other programs and even better translations. The downside is it doesn't translate English based words, sounds, and streched out words all that well, if at all sometimes.

Excite....is ok. I never thought I would miss Google until I started using Excite.

 

[reddo]

Re: What translator you guys use?

Bing's Translator is even better than Google's.

Except it's high response times and the fact that it blocks you after too many translation requests. Thaaat was a bit troublesome with games and their huge amount of messages...

It's chinese translation was so much better than google's that you couldn't even compare them both. All in all, I really approve of it. The limitations make it unusable, however.

My version of TA won't connect to Google anymore so I've been using Honyaku + Excite. Honyaku is pretty good cause they usually give a far better sentence structure than the other programs and even better translations. The downside is it doesn't translate English based words, sounds, and streched out words all that well, if at all sometimes.

Excite....is ok. I never thought I would miss Google until I started using Excite.

Atlas seems to be good enough in this time of need. Google was better, but I lack the know-how to fix TA, even if it seems all you need to do is change the url it's using for Google (It's getting a webpage it can't understand, and all the page does is say the url changed).

Its translations are a bit off, though... All the words are there, but kind of mumbled. You kind of get used to it, eventually.

 

[PrivateEyes]

Re: What translator you guys use?

For a good few years now, I have been using World Premium Translator 15 (or something like that) lol

 

[yariel]

Re: What translator you guys use?

...
hmm, to play (gameplay) I use Chiitrans ...

For work translating Game ...

You must be registered to see the links

^^ Quick translation, need proofreading, but it also show romamji too ...
(I can use this for indirect learning reading romanji, Hiragana and Katagana)

You must be registered to see the links

more careful in translation, less proofreading ...
but slow and don't show romanji ...

 

[Rin Umiko]

Re: What translator you guys use?

I've been using this lately. But it's in Japanese.

You must be registered to see the links

Nevertheless, if you are serious about understanding Japanese, learning it yourself is the best. Machine translator doesn't take context into consideration, and it's even more glaring in context-heavy languages like Japanese.

 

[Manamana]

Re: What translator you guys use?

I use ATLAS since a long time ago, translation is not great but it's understandable

 

[CrazyPerson]

Re: What translator you guys use?

In my experience, bing is also slightly better at japanese than google right now, although I don't think it makes all that much difference in the end.
That said, I don't use TA, I just use AGTH and copy-paste into a browser.

Random trick: Translation engines will try to reorder across sentences these days,
which is usually helpful, but sometimes ends up messing up translation entirely.
So whenever translation doesn't really make any sense, try adding double newline behind every comma and period, forcing the engine to translate each piece by itself.
That way, you get less fluent sentences, but a translation that's structured closer to the original.
This is especially essential if you're translating a list of something - autotranslate is really good at messing these up.

And while I'm rambling anyway, another random translation thing:
If you're using a translator to try and email/post to japanese devs:
Before just using an autotranslated text, try feeding it back into translate first and see what you get on the reverse.
I've found that certain structures translate badly ("Thank you for making this game" -> "Thank you, I made this game"),
and just going back quickly can make sure you don't have blatant mistranslations in your text.

 

[ToxicShock]

Re: What translator you guys use?

So basically, there's no good way of translating?

 

[yariel]

Re: What translator you guys use?

...
or rather, there is no "BEST" way to translate ...
it always need proofreader in various scale ...
that's why I using 2 translator ...
and still using my skill to read romaji too for proofreading ...

I've been using this lately. But it's in Japanese.

You must be registered to see the links

Nevertheless, if you are serious about understanding Japanese, learning it yourself is the best. Machine translator doesn't take context into consideration, and it's even more glaring in context-heavy languages like Japanese.

...
Actually I can understand quite a bit if I know the romanji ...
(probably because I read too much anime, so I know the "speak" but can't read the words hiragana / katagana / kanji)
this will give match if I can read the words ...

 

[ToxicShock]

Re: What translator you guys use?

One of the first suggestions to avoid having to speak a language is to learn the language. It's as if I asked for mp3's of my favorite song and someone suggested I learn to just play it on guitar. That's not an answer to me.

 

[ServerSurfer]

Re: What translator you guys use?

Google is not a preference of mine, it's decent. I always used babelfish translation, but Microsoft bought it. The translation function in Bing is pretty much that program. So for now bing is my favorite, however, there are a few others sites that do a pretty good job. Especially the European Language academics project designed to translate between european nations, but recently began doing japanese and chinese.