maybe looking into translating the first 2 bk games, what resources do i need?

lol it's ok because i'm almost done translating the first game so if you hate it then your entitled to your own opinions

So, do you know enough japanese to translate, or you took a crappy google translated version as the base and went from there?

no. i know some of the Japanese alphabet

So do you think bits of the alphabet is enough to translate a whole game?

yes, i think i've been doing pretty good if i do say so myself. i've translated 171000 lines so far

Well if you know how the thing is structured and know how the game goes it may be easyer

No, it is not. If you know only the alphabet of a language, it doesn't make you a skilled translator. Hell, I also know the czech alphabet, and I am only able to ask for food or a drink.

But really the only option is google translate and then rewriting that sentance you've got then. I'm not sure how he would've been doing ot otherwise

That's what I'm talking about. Ok let's go trannslate a dutch app, while I don't speak dutch at all. Why do we need people who know other languages, if google translate is able to do the work for us? Why do we need translators, if a 10 years old kid is able to paste thousands of lines into google translate and rewrite the sentences to their liking? Why do people study for years to get a degree in translation, if it's doable with a single app and a lot of free time?
I lost faith in humanity.

Boy, this is like some guy living in the 1800's saying, why do we need machines and factories? Somethings are highly disapproved of by many yet inevitable. I know no more than a few words in Japanese but with Mr. Google's help, I would be able to translate an app from Dutch or German to English because I do know some basic German and such translation services can help you if you can understand a language to some degree and can at least check whether what the translation suggests makes sense in the target language.

The thing is that using machines and factories is meaningless if the quality of your product is going to be hot garbage. Standards exist for a reason. If I start making cakes, and I figure out that making cakes is not within my ability, I'm not going to trounce ahead and go oh well. I know at least the basics of making cake and that you need ingredience and stuff. But I don't know any recipes for cake. Oh well. I'm just going to make some shitt because I just love making cake. Who cares that it's a waste of time and resources and that people arn't going to like it.

Exactly, as Nikolai says. If machines solve everything for us, we should stop attending translation lectures, translation offices should close, because we all can translate from any language to another.

I never said machines or AI could do the entire work perfectly. My previous post should be clear enough on that. I wouldn't already dare translate any game from Japanese to English by relying solely on Mr. Google.

I wasn't talking about your abilities because I didn't want to go into personal stuff, but fine. I have no idea how much german you know, and having studied the language my self, I am aware you can create an understandable translation using google if you know some of the grammer structure. Except you are going to stumble into some pittfalls when it comes to contextual expression.
Try translating:
Ich habe dieses Gespräch durch den Wind.
This is a sentence that actually means almost a completely different thing than it literally says, so the translator misses it.

But that's fine, right?
Except these kinds of things popp up everywhere. I remember me playing bk2 using jgt and the cutscenes were super indecipherable. That's because japanese is an even more contextual language where a lot of words mean the same thing. The translator only has the narrow context you feed to it in the text then and there.
Anybody remember how it used to refer to yamagen as "darkness people?"

A limited knowledge of alphabet isn't getting you anywhere. The best you can do is to coppy the translation because at this point the translator knows more than you do.

I wonder though how simple app developers translate their apps. Would they always need someone who perfectly speaks these languages?

cuz I don't think so

You nailed it Nikolai. At the time I wrote my previous post, I was already too tired to go into deeper stuf but exactly, as you say. What I'm going to say is a bit offtopic, but still related here. A few weeks ago, I had a task in which I had to compare the military ranking system of Russia and Hungary. It was strictly theoretical and only for translation purposes, nothing less, nothing more. After doing like 2 hours of research, I came to the conclusion that it's really strange. We both have 20 ranks, but at some points they differ so much that it would be a pain in the ass to translate from one to another. So for example in hungarian we have some ranks for which russians either don't have a word that means the exact same thing, or they have but for them it means something else, so if I wrote that one, they wouldn't think about the same rank as it is in hungarian. So yeah. This research I did, kept my faith in the fact tht we need human translators.

Great, you'll insist on not getting what I mean. I wouldn't translate Bokurano Daibouken from German if it were made in that language, but I guess I could make a Top Speed language pack without referring to an already-existing one and translate several other games from German into English and some even from English to German.

It's nice that you believe in what you are pushing forward for the tenth time, yet you didn't argue against any of our points, thus your arguments are too weak without any kind of justifications. Prove us wrong.

@ marchoffmann: I mean, define what you mean by simple. If you are talking about like a command line tool that nobody else but you are going to see then it doesn't matter. If you are distributing an app though, generally the language needs to be on point, because otherwize it really doesn't look good, and users get frustrated over broken language really quick so there goes your frequent user base. If your app speaks english, it's expected to be able to talk english properly.

Coincidentaly this is a topic I am studying at uni right now so that's cool.

Also: I'm starting to get the impression that I'm coming across as an overcorrective contrarian asswhole. That's absolutely not my intention if that is the case.