AI Translation of Nanatsu Kaze no Shima

[tombor]

I tried translating the raw text of Enix's Nanatsu Kaze no Shima using AI tools--namely Google Translate and Reverso, which helped with some context tweaking. However, I am still quite green at Saturn hacking. I thought I would post this here for someone with much better technical knowledge.

I hope it is useful.

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

How were you able to get the raw text out of the game but then not know how to come up with a way to get it back into the game?

Secondly you should probably have an actual translator look over the translation. AI and machine translation can produce pretty questionable results.

 

[tombor]

The raw text was posted in a thread on here a few years ago. I thought I could translate and tried to place the text back in but was unable to a copy to work. I was hoping to see what translation would look like and edit from there with the help of a couple friends.

 

[Danthrax]

How were you able to get the raw text out of the game but then not know how to come up with a way to get it back into the game?

Secondly you should probably have an actual translator look over the translation. AI and machine translation can produce pretty questionable results.

Nanatsu Kaze's entire script is just chillin' on the disc as raw Shift-JIS text in the TEXTDATA.BIN file.

And yeah, machine translation is 100% not the way to go with this game. The whole script is written in a very poetic way, and to properly convey that, real people would have to put a lot of thought and care into a translation.

 

[tombor]

Yeah I just wanted something to work with and see how it interacted with the game as no English translation was out there--looking at old board posts there seemed to be a couple cracks but nothing out there; it was getting it back into the game that was beyond me (though it seems like space limitations aren't that bad with this one?). What came out of the AI translation is interesting and provocative but cryptic; I have a very minimal knowledge of Japanese; a native speaker suggested Google Translate and Reverso's context option to help get something coherent.

 

[Fakkor]

The best machine translator there was till a while ago (and I know what I'm talking about) was DeepL. But GPT4o, even if not perfect as it is, if you know how to command it to do the translation of things, can give absolutely amazing results.

 

[incrediblehark]

The best machine translator there was till a while ago (and I know what I'm talking about) was DeepL. But GPT4o, even if not perfect as it is, if you know how to command it to do the translation of things, can give absolutely amazing results.

Agreed, I used gpt to translate a message asking it to sound like a natural Japanese speaker and it came out far better than any google translate I’ve used.

 

[Keldran]

We are in a new world of LLMs. GPT can output some amazing translations, especially if you provide it with additional context.

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

We are in a new world of LLMs. GPT can output some amazing translations, especially if you provide it with additional context.

I think you are serverely overestimating the abilities of Chat GPT. All it takes is the AI bugging out one time and an entire translation can come out wrong, and if you don't know Japanese you wont catch it.

 

[Keldran]

I think you are serverely overestimating the abilities of Chat GPT. All it takes is the AI bugging out one time and an entire translation can come out wrong, and if you don't know Japanese you wont catch it.

Sure, but you don't just feed 2,000 rows of text and ask it to translate in a vacuum. You work with it as you would work with a native speaker, working through phrases and providing context about the local language and about the game (of which it essentially has all information on the internet about).

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Sure, but you don't just feed 2,000 rows of text and ask it to translate in a vacuum. You work with it as you would work with a native speaker, working through phrases and providing context about the local language and about the game (of which it essentially has all information on the internet about).

Sure, but again all it takes is one bug in the AI to get a line wrong, and then if you just assume it's correct and feed it in as context to another line you start having a cascading mess in the translation.

It's one thing to use AI as a tool with an actual translator to spot check it and correct it when it goes wrong, it's another to just blindly trust it to get it right.