Google translate for Japanese games

[jay_red]

So I was playing an import game that never got an English release/fan patch and while for the most part its pretty English friendly, there was some dialogue boxes that got me stuck in a loop of not knowing what I was pressing. I had the idea to use Google Translate's feature of taking a picture of the text and having it translate it directly.

To my surprise it worked just fine taking a pic of the screen, and I was able to figure out what the options were! The process was pretty easy to use, and with some patience (and as long as you control the dialogue speed) you could easily have a rough idea of what might be going on in a game, or just use it to navigate menus like I did.

Not sure if anyone else has thought of using this, but figured I would throw it out there if you are in a pinch.

[ElkinFencer10]

Has anybody else used this? There are a few games that I'd love to try this for if it works well. For example, I have a Japanese copy of Burning Rangers (cause fucking paying the NTCS-U price), but it's all in Japanese, and I don't want to emulate just to play it in English. I could just put on my big boy britches and emulate it, but if this Google Translate jazz is actually reliable, Imma jump on that.

[noiseredux]

I tried using it to play one of the Sakura Wars on Dreamcast like 3 years ago, and it didn't work very well for me. It'd pick up a couple words but not most. Maybe it was Google Translate 3 years ago wasn't as good; maybe my phone camera wasn't good enough; maybe that particular game had a lot of complicated words...? So I don't know.

[BoneSnapDeez]

Just dawned on me that I have an Android tablet now so surely I can download this app. I'll be trying it out this evening.

I can read some Japanese (not in a particularly skilled fashion) so it'll be interesting to see how Google matches up to my own translations.

[jay_red]

I tried using it to play one of the Sakura Wars on Dreamcast like 3 years ago, and it didn't work very well for me. It'd pick up a couple words but not most. Maybe it was Google Translate 3 years ago wasn't as good; maybe my phone camera wasn't good enough; maybe that particular game had a lot of complicated words...? So I don't know.

Im not saying it will be a perfect translation, but it worked well enough for me to know what the options said that I was trying to select, and give me context as to what menu I was in. Using it on dialogue would probably result in some Engrish, but would give you the gist of the situation.

Edit: here are a couple screen shots of it working on my phone:

[BoneSnapDeez]

Okay, just tested it with Langrisser III. Not bad! Will definitely help me with some trickier words and phrases. I'm a believer.

[laurenhiya21]

I haven't used it myself, but my boyfriend has been using it for the Dragon Quest Monsters 3DS remake.

It seems to be quite helpful, since he doesn't know any Japanese but has been progressing pretty well for the most part. There's been a few times where a sentence translated to something really odd, in which case a dictionary usually helped, but generally he could get a good enough idea of what's going on with just Translate.

[pierrot]

I'm sure his name is supposed to be Fujisawa Kazuki, and other than that, it's not wrong, but it clearly can't handle nuanced colloquialisms (unsurprisingly). I could see that being a good tool for menus, but it seems like it would fall apart when faced with anything contextually sensitive, or a non-standard dialect.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Has anybody else used this? There are a few games that I'd love to try this for if it works well. For example, I have a Japanese copy of Burning Rangers (cause fucking paying the NTCS-U price), but it's all in Japanese, and I don't want to emulate just to play it in English. I could just put on my big boy britches and emulate it, but if this Google Translate jazz is actually reliable, Imma jump on that.

Maybe it's better now, but every time I'd tried to use the photo-translation feature on Google Translate it hasn't worked worth shit. It never even recognizes the characters. It has been a while though, so maybe it works better. I still wouldn't bet the farm on it though. For longer Japanese sentences, machine translation still sucks, even if it can pick up the characters. It's a decent enough last-ditch solution if you already have everything you need for it (those being a smart phone and the game).

[Duane Dibbley]

I picked up a Japanese copy of Mario Kart 64 earlier this year and used Google Translate to figure out the menus.