| General and Gaming > Classic Video Games |
| This may be a stupid question but... |
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| bloodybaron:
Hey I was just going around ebay looking for some good deals I might come across and I was noticing a lot of foreign games, mostly japanese and I know a lot of you guys on here collect for them, but I was wondering something. I don't really want to buy any of these games since I'll never play them and don't intend to learn another language, but do you think there will eventually be a way to have a system that plays them and automatically translates them to english. Not like fan translation patches that you download or anything, but actual code in the system that is able to know what it says and do a rough translation. Even if it comes out weird because it would have to be word for word is something like that possible and or something they will ever do? |
| betelgeuse:
I'm sure somebody will figure something out. Kind of like those augmented reality apps that you hold up to signs and it translates the text (very roughly of course). Everdrives or Retrons would of seamed far fetched 20 years ago. I guess anything is possible. Somebody will probably write an auto-translate program and throw it into a Retron, who knows. |
| fauxshot:
I'd say it's possible, but not necessarily practical. Even though you can directly translate things easily enough, there's a lot of context that doesn't get translated with something like Google Translate. Take literature, for example; you can give three people an original text, and they will translate it three different ways. Similar? Certainly, but each also contains small, yet distinct, variances in the translation, which can actually be pretty important. Plus, especially considering a JP to US translation, there's a lot of stylistic choices to be made. Words like baka, kawaii, and titles of persons might've been translated directly into English years ago, but nowadays I'd say it's arguably better to include some of these common terms (and, gauging the potential audience of JP games, I'd assume they're more likely to both want and understand some of these basic terms). Additionally, cultural context is a consideration as well. For games, like literature I'm sure, there also has to be a greater sense of general understanding of themes, ideas, etc. to get a quality translation (listening to the music, seeing the art style, and playing the game, I would argue, are important parts of the translation process, even though it requires no lingual translation... but I suppose I wouldn't know how many translation departments actually do so). Even though my experience with translation is almost zilch (the largest project I've undertaken was translating a single song for Chinese class), I think that there will always be a need for human translators. Even though the job seems pretty straightforward, translators play an incredibly important role, and a game (at least, for bi-lingual fans) can make it or break it depending on a good translation. There are things that I just wouldn't trust a computer to catch, understand, and translate properly, even with a sophisticated code. But, I would say that the tech would be useful. I think Google has some kind of thing where you can take a picture of words in a foreign language, and it translates them. Something like that would be nice for, let's say, a Gameboy game that doesn't need much in the way of translation, but requires some in order to properly play it. I think there's one article which talks about the translation of Danganronpa and the Zero Escape series, but those contain spoilers, I believe. I should read them, though... this is a good question, and it'd do some good to understand more about the process. |
| theflea:
I'd love to see an adapter of some kind (like a game genie) that would ad a sub-title to the screen auto translating the game. I really don't think there's any way to do this in game unless by someone reprogramming the game to English. I've bought many of these. I can see an adapter that you plug the cart into (like a game Genie) or Plug into the console somehow, maybe even a disc swap like Game Shark that reads the game then adds subtitles. Maybe if the adapter looked in all the text files in the game and converted it into English. It might have translation flaws, (could be funny in it self) but I'd buy one if someone made it. Someone needs to get on this. lol |
| richvgs:
The Retron5 had a patch in the winter that allows fan translations to be uploaded and used in many JPN only games. |
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