gbadev.org forum archive

This is a read-only mirror of the content originally found on forum.gbadev.org (now offline), salvaged from Wayback machine copies. A new forum can be found here.

DS homebrew announcements > Japanese and English phrase converter

#159707 - iainprice - Fri Jul 04, 2008 7:30 pm

What do you guys think? There are only 30 phrases at the moment... and yes I know I have to find the Japanese for:

Please enter your phrase
Sorry no matches found
Please choose your phrase

and I need to add lots more phrases into it.... but this is only a demo.

arrows or touch to move through phrases
A or touch to listen to sounds
Both shoulder buttons together to toggle UK->JAP or JAP->UK

give it a try and let me know what you think.......the text wrapping needs a little work i know.......


http://www.filefactory.com/file/7c1c97/n/translate_zip

#159713 - sgeos - Fri Jul 04, 2008 10:09 pm

Jim Breen's WWWJDIC is the best Japanese resource on the net for English speakers. Other than that, try google with the language set to Japanese. You can also set the language to Japanese but navigation to English, like this.

-Brendan

#159714 - ProdigySim - Fri Jul 04, 2008 11:19 pm

The WWWJDIC has a huuuge example phrases library. I don't know if it's available/free for download, though.

Also this site:
http://www.alc.co.jp/

Is very good for Japanese<->English phrase translation.

#159717 - sgeos - Sat Jul 05, 2008 12:44 am

ProdigySim wrote:
The WWWJDIC has a huuuge example phrases library. I don't know if it's available/free for download, though.

The Tanaka Corpus is in the public domain.

WWWJDIC Copyright Status
WWWJDIC wrote:
COPYRIGHT

The material being displayed in WWWJDIC's pages is copyright. Much of it is drawn from dictionary files the copyright of most of which is held by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG). Other material is associated with the WWWJDIC server and software. It is being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence. (V3.0) What does this mean in practical terms? Well:
    a. you can use WWWJDIC in the same way as you use a published dictionary to assist you with translating text and words. The results of your translation may be published, sold, etc. If you make heavy use of WWWJDIC it would be nice to acknowledge that, but there is no requirement to do more;
    b. you can link to WWWJDIC, e.g. using the backdoor entry, from other servers, provided you acknowledge that use on your server, and provide links to WWWJDIC and its documentation.
    c. if you wish to publish significant extracts of the output from WWWJDIC, for example if you use the Translate Words in Text function to generate a vocabulary list for a textbook of reading passages, then this comes under the scope of the licence for the dictionary files, which permits publication of subsets of the files. You must acknowledge the source of this information. Other information produced by the server, e.g. the verb conjugation tables, may be published but the source must be acknowledged.
    d. the Stroke Order Diagrams are under either Jack Halpern's or Jim Rose's copyright. You may link to the pages displaying those images, but you must not download or reuse the images without their respective permissions.
    e. the example sentences are from the Tanaka Corpus and are in the Public Domain;
For more details, see the licence statement covering the dictionary files.

The dictionary files can be downloaded.

I noticed that your demo uses romaji for the Japanese. Do you have any plans to change this? If I recall correct, the k14 font does not have any usage restrictions. (Something to double check.) Google "k14.bdf". It has been a while since I have worked with the file, but converting it into a useful format is not difficult.

As far as managing localized text goes, commercial shops often use spreadsheets. Excel can save spreadsheets to easy to parse tab delimited text files. If you send out your localization spreadsheet with the binary and provide return instructions, you might be able to get other people to manage the complexity of filling you tool with content so you can focus on the programming. Such a spreadsheet should probably contain the following columns:
    New Entry - (Y/N) So you can keep track of things that have been added.
    Modified - (Y/N) So you can keep track of things that have been improved.
    English - Self explanatory.
    Romaji - For people who do not know hiragana or katakana.
    Kana - To keep track of pronunciation. May want to choose hiragana or katakana. Worth having even if you have no plans to use it in the near future.
    Kanaji - Anything less than kanji is not very useful if you serious about Japanese. Worth having even if you have no plans to use it in the near future.
Columns worth thinking about:
    ID - A unique ID for each line is generally a good idea.
    Author - Original author of the entry.
    Updated By - Last modified by this person.
    Modified - Last modified date.
    Notes - A column for notes is generally a good idea.
I'm not sure what your ultimate goals for this project are, but CJKV Information Processing, by Ken Lunde, is a book everyone who does any sort of technical localization work should own. (Assuming you are working with those languages, of course.)

-Brendan