
A new way of playing Japanese and English games side-by-side (2016) - cableshaft
https://legendsoflocalization.com/a-new-way-of-playing-japanese-and-english-games-side-by-side/
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ad404b8a372f2b9
Instant, in-software, translation is an amazing way to learn languages and I
can't congratulate the author enough on his implementation. The Guild Wars MMO
had a similar functionality built-in that allowed the player to press Ctrl to
show the whole U.I in another language. When letting go it'd go back to the
primary language. Don't know why they implemented that but it got me 80% of
the way to fluency in English. I implemented something similar for the Kindle
Reader and I use it often to learn Japanese and Korean.

If people have other examples of software with this functionality I'd love to
hear about them.

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lnanek2
> I implemented something similar for the Kindle Reader

Hey, that's awesome, do you have a github repo for the Kindle Reader
change/companion app? I learn Chinese using Kindle and the native app
experience for that is really terrible. I have to highlight lines I don't
understand which takes a long press and selecting the start and end, copy
them, then Google Translate pops up. After enough lines are copied, Kindle
refuses to let you highlight more, so then I have to long press again and
delete the line to avoid hitting that limit. Long press to see translation
would be so much faster. I wish it was like desktop software where there's
plenty of browser plugins to show you translations on mouse hover.

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Cyberdog
Here's an article from the same site from last month showing additional
progress that's been made on this tool, now called Wanderbar:
[https://legendsoflocalization.com/wanderbar/](https://legendsoflocalization.com/wanderbar/)

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patrec
Interesting concept. I only skimmed, so maybe the rationale is explained in
the article, but I'm a bit surprised by the "reverse subtitle" design aspect.
That is to say, rather than seeing the original language by default and
getting some side-bar with translated text to help you over bumps, you play
the translation with a gloss of the original text in a side bar. So by default
you kinda need to put your eyes where the translated stuff is.

Isn't that noticeably less efficient if the aim is learning the original
language?

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animal531
A word by word replacement would be great. For example in an RPG, begin in all
English but as you go on begin to slowly replace common words (with
explanations as necessary); then later begin to fix grammar and sentence
structure.

I recently read Shogun and it's pretty interesting how you pick up a few bits
of the language here and there.

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aquova
For those who aren't familiar with the author, Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin is one
of the most well-known video game fan translators. He's probably most famous
for being the lead for the Mother 3 fan translation, and last I heard was
working officially as a translator for Nintendo.

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deskamess
This hit a happy comfy sweet spot. The right level of hack for me. Fighting
randomness, iterative development, and unique solutions (create your own enemy
names from attributes). Very organic development. One of those 'sum is greater
than the parts' efforts.

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microcolonel
I wonder what kind of effort went into fitting the dialog into just 182 kanji,
I suppose a lot of words were in kana that would not otherwise be.

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terrycody
I think I read somewhere people already developed a new ML system to live
translation in-game text, but forgot where.

