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AdmiralAsshattoday at 5:39 PM1 replyview on HN

It's a shame to see all the pearl-clutching about the use of AI. I've been playing ROMs and fantrans since the early aughts, and we were content back then when some of our desired games just got menu translations. I've watched a ton of projects spring up around the games people wanted to play, only to stall or die out because the majority of the project people were programmers, and the one translator was a college student enrolled in Japanese 102 who flaked out.

Human translation should obviously be the end-goal, particularly in a text-heavy game from the 32-bit era...but that shouldn't undercut the technical achievement of this hack, even if the MTL text becomes little more than placeholder. Put it all up online, make it easy for someone to pick up the script and translate it independently in chunks, and then insert it back in later. That's how a number of fan-trans were done in the past, if memory serves.


Replies

threetonesuntoday at 6:45 PM

Also AI for translation is one of the best and oldest uses of AI, to the point where if this translation didn't exist, you could probably get by simply pointing your phone at the text and getting real time translations. An open forum for communicating back all the places people go "huh, that doesn't seem right" and fixing it is even better.