Question about Eroge translation for the non-Japanese reader

[kittycatcher]

Hey everyone,

I'm new to the Eroge / Visual Novel scene, my very first game actually, and running into a road block. I don't read or speak any Japanese. Now, how I'm trying to overcome it is using the Google Translate with screen shots. I'm getting about 95% success rate (I think) on the text.

Now I'm pretty sure they just type out what the character is saying, I've been watching anime for quite a long time, and can gather a few key phrases here and there. At least enough to know I'm not missing anything major.

I'm looking for an app that can get installed on the desktop (ideally) to help translate those Japanese sentances.

SO,

TL;DR:

I'm trying to play my first Eroge / Visual Novel as an English speaker with NO functional Japanese experience. Google Translate camera has been getting me mostly over the hump, but is there any other app that works better?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Frankincense]

Are you familiar with text hookers and parsers? This is a little long though: http://www.anime-sharing.com/forum/tech-support-talk-12/ith-translation-aggregator-guide-67016/

 

[kittycatcher]

Thanks for your reply Frankincense. I ran across that exact post last night (just before my freaking basement flooded :( ) and I'm actually going to try it out right now!

BTW I ran across your Japanese for Erogamers thread and really enjoyed it, keep up the good work.

 

[kittycatcher]

Just as an FYI to anyone coming across this thread in the future, I found that aniclan.com (not a shameless plug, honestly) has a program called Visual Novel Reader and it’s very straightforward with a nice GUI.

Sorry if this gets me a warning from a mod, but I thought the community would benefit.

 

[Takato]

Hey everyone,

I'm new to the Eroge / Visual Novel scene, my very first game actually

[...] NO functional Japanese experience

Not sure if you know that there's English translations available for many Visual Novels. If you just want to read some Visual Novels, you can just read them in English, to get into the scene. There's many VN's translated to English, especially newer ones. You can read some in Japanese once you decided if VN's are for you.

 

[kittycatcher]

Thanks Takako, I’ll make sure to look at those as well.