Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Installing and Configuring Eroge
- The Bare Essentials
- Mecab and Jparser
- The Replacement Script and Other Add Ons
- Other Tools
- Playing eroge WITHOUT Machine Translators
- When Things Go Wrong
Latest update: (14 Mar) Okay a majority of the new section is up. There is still some minor stuff that I’m still editing, but it should be completed very soon.
So you’re interested in untranslated eroge, but you don’t understand (much) Japanese. What can you do? Fortunately there’s a translation program which can translate the Japanese in real time called ATLAS. As a user of it myself, I know that setting up everything can be quite frustrating. So I’ve written a guide on setting up the stuff you’ll need in order to play eroge in English using translators.
If this introduction looks too long for you, and you KNOW you want to use ATLAS already, feel free to move on =>> =>>
The idea is simple enough, but using ATLAS isn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s a machine translation, so it can be hard to interpret. You could probably say that only 1 out of 100 people will be able to STAND using translators to play eroge.
Taking into account various factors, I would recommend ATLAS to people who:
- Have developed an amateur level of Japanese (or higher) from watching anime
- Have played a few translated eroge, and have a thirst for lots more
- Are patient and aren’t overly critical of faults
ATLAS is by no means perfect. If it WAS, you wouldn’t see groups out there fan translating games. The main thing that you should know is: you won’t understand everything in a game.
So what’s the point?
ATLAS translations give you decent information about the target sentence. Using this information, and some common sense, you should be able to piece together an understanding on what the sentence means. I would say that in general, at this stage you would probably understand around 50%. The degree you understand a sentence will improve depending on the following factors:
- The complexity of the game
- How well you make use of other tools
- Experience
- Your Japanese ability
1) Games that are generally ATLAS friendly are charage and nukige. Charage are games more focused on character development, and nukige are games that just focus on H-scenes.
Types of eroge to avoid (at least at first):
- Eroge which have a complicated story
- Eroge with a lot of important focus on the supernatural, history etc.
- RPG type, action type and any other type of eroge which requires more than just simple mouse clicking
Frankly, some of these game types are probably impossible to play using ATLAS. Others may just require more experience.
2) Aside from ATLAS, this guide also covers:
- TA (translation aggregator)
- ITH (interactive text hooker)
- Mecab & Jparser
- TAHplugin, TAHelper, and the replacement script
- Other translators
Don’t settle for JUST ATLAS. Utilize all the available tools to increase your understanding of an eroge.
3) As you play more eroge using ATLAS, you’ll start to get used to errors that it makes. By taking these errors into account, your understanding should improve.
4) I know what you’re thinking, “If I HAD Japanese ability, I wouldn’t be using ATLAS in the first place!!! Stop messy with me you bastard!!”, etc. The thing is, like or not, as you play more eroge, your Japanese ability will probably improve. If you’re not learning Japanese, at the very least your listening skills should improve.
Taking these factors into account, your understanding of a game should reach the level where you can enjoy it. Back in the day, I played eroge using JUST ATLAS, with basically no Japanese knowledge, and I was still somehow able to enjoy it. So you never know, you might get lucky.
———————————————————————————————————————
To conclude this overly long intro, nothing beats learning Japanese if you wanna play eroge.
But!
Do you really wanna wait years until you can enjoy untranslated eroge? If you’re DESPERATE (like me), and you can’t be stuffed waiting to play the latest eroge, ATLAS might just be for you. I would still suggest learning Japanese on the side though. A little Japanese goes a long way when it comes to understanding. As you play, and as your Japanese grows, you may find that one day you don’t need to use ATLAS any more . A dream we probably all share =3
If I somehow managed to convince you to use ATLAS, feel free to move on.
Installing and Configuring Eroge =>>
Hey I need some help. For some reason I did everything correctly but no text is appearing in TA. I made sure Auto copy to clipboard is checked.
Assuming that your text hooker program is grabbing the text from the game properly, it might be because the “Automatic clipboard translation” setting in TA has been toggled off. There should have a small button next to the panel name with a small clipboard inside.
Oh I got the issue solved. I just needed to highlight the text in ITH. Just wondering is there any way to make the English translation sound more fluent? I’m getting sentences like these “[So], Judging from the current expression, from it, Having met us : [**]……? ” It looks like the sentences just got flipped backwards. I do take basic Japanese and I can try and assume what the characters are saying but it just takes some effort. I checked out the section about translation quality by the way. Can’t say I trust online translators that much. =/
TA outputs should appear in REAL TIME as text appears in whatever game you’re playing. If you need to highlight that text EVERY time to make TA give you some output, then something is wrong. If not, then it’s all good.
ATLAS outputs can be somewhat improved by using the replacement script. Otherwise you may want to consider using “LEC power translator”, which I have found to give pretty decent translations. Aside from that, there’s not a whole lot more that I can think of to improve translation quality.
If you’re up for it, you can always give the “machine assisted method” of playing eroge a try ^^.
I mean highlighting isn’t that bad. I just highlight one sentence and I’m good to go. I did download Atlas and it did come with a dictionary but I’m not sure if that will help. Assuming is sometimes fun even if you get put on the wrong track entirely. Machine assisted is alright. It’s just when there are many definitions to one phrase then I just assume.
Haha assumption or what I would like to call it, “Imagination”, is probably one of the key things that allowed me to enjoy eroge with the use of MTs. Sure you might not assume the right thing, but if you enjoy yourself, who cares? =p
Do you have any idea as to how to program the tet tot the game yourself? I just want to try to translation games for others.
Sorry I wouldn’t really know where to start when it comes to programming or the like. However you may want to have a look at this guide which shows you how to translate visual novels without knowing how to program.
http://sakimichi.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/how-to-translate-visual-novels-without-hacking/
So I’m on step 3 where you select the UserHook and then press OK. I do that, but nothing ever happens. I don’t get any new messages in the ITH main screen. Any ideas?
That’s happened to me a few times as well. Unfortunately I can’t remember how I got around it. In the worst case, you might need to try using AGTH.
Which game are you trying to play?
Nevermind. I closed all the programs and redid it. It’s working. Thanks for the guide
VERY HELPFUL
Glad to be of service ^^.
I am encountering the same problem as toratoransu. Please let me know if you remember.
What do I do with the files in the “other specific game examples” folder? For Walkure Romanze it says “*Walkure Romanze (Ricotta)
*Remove speaker names
(^(【(.+)】|(.+))([「])){1} $5
*Remove text when chapter loading
((^)(あああ+名前|あああ+))
“
Sorry could you give me a bit more context? Are you talking about TA or ITH or what?
Can you tell me where the first, second, and third images are from?
From the top down:
Signal Heart
Koiiro Soramoyou
Lover Able
Thanks
Hi, for some reason it seems that the game I’m trying to play doesn’t show up on the process list. Is there something I can do about that?
Which game is it?
Hapy Maher, I decided i wanted to try it after reading the short review
I installed the game and I was able to attach it to ITH; it shows up as “cmvs32″. If you’re using 32bit windows you may find that you need the following H-code so that text appears properly:
/HAC@48FF3:cmvs32.exe
If you’re using 64bit windows, you’ll need to download the 64bit version of ITH which can be found here. In that case the game should show up as “cmvs64″ and I have heard that the 64 bit ITH doesn’t require any H-code.
Thank you so much! After getting the 64 bit version it started working fine.
Am I missing a password somewhere? I got Hanahira from Uploading and it asks for a key
If anything here requires a password, the password will be “amaenbou”
Hi, I’m trying to install Lover Able with the bitshare link and I get this error.
http://postimg.org/image/yre5wcj9j/
Pls help me with it, I really want to
It says that the you’ve included am “invalid” character in the installation folder name. Try renaming the install folder to something simple, like “lover able” and the it should work.
It works
. Thks a lot
Hey Aero.
I just found something very interesting that could help everyone when it comes to playing eroges with ATLAS.
Which is this: http://kanji.sljfaq.org/
It’s a website where you can use your mouse to ‘draw’ on the area designed for it.
Thereby making it possible to write kanji which ATLAS can not translate, or to write kanji which ATLAS can’t show(such as RPG style eroge, or other types of eroge where ITH can’t display it.)
Though it’s a slow and quite irritating process…
It still makes it possible to do such things which ATLAS/ITH/TA etc. can’t do.
Personally I’m currently using it to ‘translate’ the raw Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Come wa Macchigatteiru light novel(it’s a really slow process, as my japanese are still quite bad. It takes like 10-25 min a page XD).
Anyways it was just to let you know about this ^o^/
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately I don’t think it’ll be of that much help.
The main problem is that you need existing knowledge of how to write kanji in order to use that website. Since the website makes use of stroke order and stroke count, people who have no knowledge of this stuff would find it difficult to use.
Also as you stated, it’s a slow and irritating process. From a cost vs benefit perspective, ATLAS users would probably choose to ignore the kanji since they aren’t understanding 100% of the game in the first place.
Given those reasons, I will hold back from recommending it in my guide. However once again, thank you for the suggestion.
Haha I don’t read ANY light novels. Reason => No H-SCENES. LOL
Hm~~ I see
Well what I primarily meant, was that in some rpg styled games there will be kanji ‘on the scene’ which ATLAS can’t translate.
These kanji are usually some kind of button, in order to access some kind of feature.
And what I thought was that the site could be of help in these situation.
On the other hand chances are big that one can surf the net in order for information about these buttons, or simply just try everything in order to gain an understanding.
So all in all I think that it MAY sometimes(quite rarely) be of use, which makes it quite handy to have :3
Though I guess it alright if ya aren’t adding it, simply wanted to point out this as I’m using it a lot these days, in order to translate that novel(hopefully after those ~240 pages, my japanese would have improven quite a bit).
And lol XD, I simply read it cuz I really like that story
The protagonist is ‘up’ probably the protagonist that I have had the easiest time relating to(quite the loner myself, though different from him).
Gotten hooked on it since I saw the anime.
And oh yea~ doesn’t there exist japanese adult novels??
Though it’s merely something that I have gotten to ‘know’ from manga, anime(as well as h-manga + h-doujinshis).
Forgot to add a phrase a friend of my always says.
Which is: it’s better to have a zombie apocalypso shelter and never need it, than not having it and actually ending up needing it XD
Though in my case…
Apocalypso -> Prolly no electricity -> no computer -> no H-manga, H-doujinshis and no eroges -> Not a life worth living….
XD
lol I tried to write a few words there and actually got the stroke order and the stroke count right and they all matched! I’m too good at this.
Hi there
In the beginning, after downloading and installing Atlas,
I get the popup where it says to pick an option
word 2000
powerpoint 2000
excel 2000
When I click word 2000, for example, it doesn’t work.
Like the application closes and it says that translation setup wasn’t completed?
I don’t know what to do
Thanks^^
Nah it should be fine. When I install ATLAS, I usually just ignore that stuff and click cancel.
Yep, in the end, I just did that and no problems had occurred.. which is what I was afraid of. Thanks^^
Hmm, the method you described here is basically what I use. This is very helpful as it allows you to learn the language and be able to play the game at the same time
Haha I agree; it’s a very useful method if you’ve already attained a decent understanding of Japanese. From what I’ve seen, the method is used by quite a number of people. Maybe the name I gave the method will catch on, but I doubt it >___>.
Hi, sorry but i don’t speak english very well. I don’t understand one thing: I’ve downloaded ITH updater v3, then when i click on the “update ith” button nothing happens..is it normal? how do i do the update correctly? Tnx
If i recall correctly, it should do some sorta update process thing. In your ITH window it’ll say what version you’re using. If it says 3.0, then you’re fine.
Hi, can anybody help me ? I was wondering why the text didn’t appear on ITH but 0001:5532:0x005137A0:0x00519F96:0x0000001A:KiriKiri1
Sorry i’m bad at explaining things so here is the SS : http://puu.sh/3cnq0.jpg
Thx
LOL I was actually replaying that EXACT moment yesterday. Next to the words “console output” is a button to open a drag box. From there, select the appropriate thread.
i don’t get what u said, but i’ve solved it somehow, anyway thanks a lot for your guide it really helps.