Is machine translation really worth it?

Being fluent and half Japanese, It bewilders me when someone tells me they use a hook and machine translate the visual novel.

How could you enjoy the VN like that? I mean, if you used Rikai-chan for hiragana and a dictionary, maybe that'd help you learn Japanese while slowly reading the VN, but how is reading the whole thing through machine translation enjoyable at all?

Well, I certainly wouldn't mind it. I can only read katakana, and even then I don't know what the words mean. If I had to choose between not being able to read a Visual Novel or having a machine translate it, I'd choose the machine. If I were able to understand hiragana and the spoken Japanese language, then maybe I'd choose to go through it in its raw form. Until then, a machine would be the best option for an untranslated Visual Novel, in my opinion.

It actually depends on the people itself. It's all about the hard work that you pour into it in the end.

For me it gets the job done, and I've actually used it for 3 years before "retiring" from it. Did I enjoy it? Yes. The fact that I can play untranslated Japanese VNs was already a mindblowing thing back then. After finding it out, I played VNs like a madman tried almost every untranslated ones that I can get.
Of course it's not all fun and play, since I had to become a linguist and try very hard to make each lines make sense by changing some of the words and rearranging it myself so that I can understand the sentence and in the end the story. FYI, in those days I was self-studying Japanese.

After those 3 years, I've had enough experience to play a VN so that I don't need to use it. How did I survive that experience? It's because I always keep in mind that "I'm actually putting some effort into something that I love."
and I honestly don't like the wait for translations.

So, it's worth is relevant to your motivation to actually use it. If you just install and try it, without trying to "understand it" hoping for a short cut, you'll get disappointed.

I'm probably going to use machine translation until the end of time. It's like a helping hand; I can read Japanese but to have an extra language as a support is extremely useful. Perhaps because I'm extremely fluent with English and love writing stories that I have no problems understand the meaning behind the seemingly garbled/nonsensical words.

I don't see any thing wrong with using programs to help read something you love. I also have experience in using them for 1 year. It's been long ago and I have quit reading VN that way after finished some games. Although I still barely understand Japanese now.

I do agree that putting together the mess those programs translated for me was a pain though. Maybe I need some motivation to continue studying Japanese.

From my personal experience, I had such problems with trying to make sense of the machine translated sentences that I eventually went ahead and self-studied for Japanese.

I rarely play VN's. In fact I've only finished two VN's. I've barely played School Days and I'm only halfway through my second route on Katawa Shoujo. Those are both english, but I would use machine if they weren't. I'm self-studying so I can "repay" back to the manga community and translate lyrics. I don't really care about speaking as much although I'm still going to learn it.

I only use machine translation of a visual novel that greatly sparks my interest. If I find it worth it to utilize a machine translation, then I will bear with it and read along. If there is a English translation project for a visual novel I'm interested in, then I will wait for a translation. I would rather get a machine translation of a great story, rather than ignore the great story altogether.

I imagine people might be able to piece together the gist of what is going on in VNs that don't use too complicated Japanese. But otherwise, machine translated sentences are way too nonsensical. I can read Japanese so I never actually tried reading an entire VN like that, but I imagine it might ruin part of the atmosphere and the characters' personalities/personal quirks wouldn't come across at all. Or I dunno. Like I said, I have little personal experience with it.

Still, if people want to use it, more power to them. I'm not one to ruin anyone's fun.

I used to work part-time as a translator/interpreter, and during this time I found that machine translation is UTTER CRAP. However, it is good at providing me with a gist of the true meaning of things and that's where it's handy.

VNs are pretty iffy when played with a machine/online translator as the resulting translation can be illegible. Which is why I usually wait for translations.

Doesn't machine translation work well with things like manuals?

It can work well with languages that have similar structures, I guess. If the languages are quite different, however, and this is the case for Japanese here as well, the result can be quite bad.

Of course it's not enjoyable. However, this is a form of learning. It's much better compared to sitting your ass off waiting till the game is translated.

[color=#2e1a6b]I got it to work, but it was not at all enjoyable.

I'd like to use this as a learning tool once I'm a little better at reading. I'm learning to recognize Kanji by playing Slime Forest, which is working our pretty well. I can read all hiragana and Katakana, and about 500 Kanji.

One of the reasons, I confess, that I am trying to learn Japanese in the first place is just so I can play VNs. Now I have tried several things, from taking a class with a tutor, to buying Rosetta Stone, but even though I learned some Japanese and hirigana and Katakana, Kanji is still out of my league and I work 12+ hour days so time to study is difficult. Now I have heard of these machines that translate for you and I have considered them, just so I can learn again while playing the games. Just need the time to download the tech and the games and work it out. Till then I wait for translations.

I say no, i just use it as last resort.
machine translation is horrible than google translated, google translate still bad :P
take example when playing saberfish game queen's blade rebelion. dang the game could not be in window mode, that suck i can't see the translation.
another example: name the person also get translated, if you play majikoi using machine you know what i mean

This has nothing to do with the quality of the machine translation itself, and there are ways to force them into window mode



This is where the part where you use your own effort. Like I said in my post, Machine translation is useless, unless you "work together" with it you won't get anything worthwhile.
Expecting it to be a miracle machine is not the way it's made.
There's a reason why most of them include a word editing and saving program into these translators.

This is more of a language aptitude problem, and the fact that kanji is incredibly hard to learn if you didn't take lessons as a child.

There are over hundreds - or thousands, I never counted - different kanji symbols you could learn. Each one of them has a specific combination, and some of them have similar parts (What we call Bu Shou) that usually represents a certain meaning, which you could use to deduce the entire symbol's meaning. I've had ten years of Chinese education - excluding kindergarten - from primary to high school, so I could read almost every kanji that's already there, even though my ability to write them has diminished quite considerably (can't remember how to write them lol, haven't done it in years).

My point is, if you're trying to learn kanji in order to read Japanese VNs, it should be a lot easier instead to try and make sense of what the machine translations meant. I'm not sure about the other countries' education, but when I was small we had these simple exercises called, 'form a sentence' where a sentence is scrambled, and you have to put them back together and make it readable. Machine translated texts are basically like that, but on harder difficulty. Identify the key words, and if one sentence doesn't make sense never mind, proceed to the next few sentences, as you'll eventually get the whole picture quite thoroughly. Rely on voices to tell the mood of conversations, try translating only a few words at a time to see what they mean (usually the kanjis, for those who don't understand it), etc, etc.

It's fun to read, it's fun to write, and playing around with languages is something I'll never get bored with. In a sense, machine translations help me understand exactly how the Japanese language structure works. I'll even say that I would trust machine translated texts over a person's explanation any day, because the latter has strong room for misconceptions and lies. =3