English-friendly Super Famicom games from Japan

Google translate is very hit or miss with Japanese, especially as old games tend to forget punctuation. I couldn’t understand a word of the first few dialogue boxes in Lagrange Point for example. And even the party screen and its supposedly typical RPG choices doesn’t make sense:

JP: リスト, も桃の, のうリょく, そうび, リーダー
Google: List, even peach, politeness, love, leader
Fan translation: list, inventory, techs, equip, leader

[Edit] the second word was incorrectly read. It should be もちもの, rice cake.
Also, it couldn’t detect the kanjis (?) that I’m assuming represent the different body parts in the “equip” menu.

So yeah, Google translate can be useful, in a last resort kind of way.

Yep, I agree. When I found out about it I was stoked but it sometimes doesn’t translate correctly or it struggles.

I don’t recall who was at bat (Professional Baseball Spirits 2015) but I’m pretty sure his name isn’t Holy one, lol.

Oh, and don’t use the instant translation on a CRT, it will drive your phone crazy. It’s hilarious though!

Instant translation is worse than garbage.

If you take a photo and highlight it tends to work better. But it does sometimes not pick up characters, and nearly always comes back with a terrible translation – enough to get by, enough for menus usually, but not enough to understand anything.

Especially for names it’s pretty natural that it would not work well unless it detects that it’s a name and should just transliterate.

Yeah still photos get better results because they’re uploaded and processed on the server rather than in real time on the phone.

And, yes, results vary depending on font quality, size, background graphics, etc. But it works well enough for me to use it as my first choice for navigating the menus of newly acquired Japanese games. I don’t think I’d be masochistic enough to try to translate a whole JRPG with it.

Also, Google Translate uses Machine Learning, so if you have some troublesome text then just try again, even just a week later it’s likely the translation will have improved significantly. Everything that is scanned goes to improve the system. There’s a great article on this that I’ll try to fish out of my reading list archive.

Here we go: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html

Thanks. This article is actually relevant for work I’m doing.

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Excellent! You’re welcome.