Getting Started/Computer-assisted translation

work in progress I don't know how to save drafts on wikis without them being public

_{who the hell creates a hyperlink for an MTL guide, puts it on the wiki landing page, and then doesn't make the page I mean like come on guys}

WEBSITES

Bing/Google Translate

https://www.bing.com/translator

https://translate.google.com

Two of the most famous translation services to exist in the modern internet, and they're both shit at Japanese. They can kinda-sorta do individual words but they choke and die once you start throwing sentences at them. Use if you have nothing else.

Google Translate is unique among translation services in showing the romaji on text you give it, which gives it a niche use case.

DeepL

https://www.deepl.com/translator

DeepL is as of 2022 the best and most consistently correct Japanese MTL service we have. If you use the desktop client (available on their website) you can press "Ctrl + C + C" (control then C twice rapidly) to automatically copy whatever the selected text is over for translation. The only real downsides of using DeepL is that it's not automatic and there isn't any form of offline mode in the official client. It gets confused sometimes if you feed it too much at once, so you may occasionally need to re-paste whatever it was line by line to get it to work right. Very convenient to just have running in the background to translate day to day things you may come across.

Papago

https://papago.naver.com/?sk=auto&tk=ja

Papago is a browser only (as far as I know) translation service that's the only real competitor around to DeepL. If you need to translate KR or CN, this is the service for you. While it's still much better than google or Bing, it's not as good as DeepL is for Japanese so for era there's not much reason to use it, beyond it being marginally faster.

Yandex

https://translate.yandex.com

Yandex is a bit of a meme. It spits gibberish more than it doesn't but it has personality, so it's fun to keep it open just to laugh at it. Allegedly quite good at Russian, but not a tool to use for Japanese.

WWWJDIC

http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1C

JDIC is an expansive online Kanji/Hiragana dictionary that explains the possible meanings of individual characters and phrases. It can pull important words out of longer texts, but isn't meant to be a full bodied translator.

PROGRAMS

ATLAS v14

https://mega.nz/#!zsVgxIbZ!gAdr3d7n_rjXC-KpmgJv_7A4eRvrryESNcEAWXKljDQ

Offline Japanese dictionary and rudimentary translator. The dictionary aspect is the most practical part of it, and is required for Chiitrans to work properly. Is ancient with a mildly complicated installation procedure.

Translation Aggregator

https://github.com/uyjulian/Translation-Aggregator/releases

Translation Aggregator is a tool made by Hongfire members (RIP) that lets you copy text to multiple websites at once and shows the translations in one window for you to compare them. Currently, it has support for getting translations from Atlas V13 or V14 (Don't need to have Atlas running), Google, Honyaku, Babel Fish, FreeTranslations.com, Excite, OCN, a word-by-word breakdown from WWWJDIC, MeCab, which converts Kanji to Katakana, and its own built-in Japanese parser (JParser). Very good for people unfamiliar with Japanese or machine translation in general and the differing translations can help you puzzle out what whatever the original text actually means. Extended use is basically guaranteed to get you 403'd from Google, Bing, and all the other website translators, but such is life. Is not compatible with DeepL or Papago.

Chiitrans

https://mega.nz/#!qpNAXC7R!hJyxXV3umjbqP7zvxR7-8kahaGGRrWgN_FhU7g8QBdM (/egg/ custom version)

The tool of choice for people actually trying to translate things in the game. It consists of two windows: one for settings and hooking the program to other programs (don't do this for era) and one for displaying the input + translation. It also displays Ruby text over characters to help divine their meaning. You can hover your mouse over characters to view the possible definitions. Not recommended to use for playing, as it only uses ATLAS which is not good at anything beyond individual words.

AutoHotKey

https://mega.nz/folder/4DljGYxR#073V2Y2wMjitj8yz3lG6-Q (Raw script and precompiled included)

User TheGigaBrain#3383 on our discord made an autohotkey script designed to clean up clipboard content. It helps prevent flooding the MTL with lots of text at once and filters out non-Japanese strings of text. You can also go through the text in your clipboard line-by-line which helps improve translation accuracy. Highly recommended for use with any automated translator.

Sugoi

V3.0: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X-n96M_Lf64EqqsQDt0uCDlZtXoschzk/view

V3.0 Offline: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KgAsQzI-A0D8vmNIekwIRKlflGw9xz3i/view

Toolkit V2.0 Beta https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DfrspQOz00tIFoAtS8zkZgfCgvi-TpVp/view?usp=sharing

Click for demonstration video made by developer

Developer's Patreon (find updates here, no payment required)

Sugoi is a newer program visually similar to Chiitrans, but is the only automated translation tool that has DeepL integration. It also has an offline mode that is shockingly good, but this version is VERY, VERY HEAVY, clocking in at a whopping 2.9 GB and requiring 8 GB of RAM. If you have a CUDA 11 _{(as of Feb. 2022, may change)} compatible GPU you can use this powershell script to offload stuff onto your GPU and make it substantially faster.