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INTEREST: NTT DoCoMo's New Smart Glasses Could Translate Manga Instantly

Fun fact: The US Foreign Service Institute recommends 88 weeks of training to reach "General Professional Proficiency" for the Asian languages you listed(taking Chinese as shorthand for the multiple spoken languages), twice what they recommend for the next hardest, Russian(French is in the easiest category). French, German(second easiest category) and Russian are also part of the same sprachbund as English, so their grammar is all extremely similar to begin with.

As a professional Japanese/English translator (thanks, years of anime and manga fandom!), I can guarantee that without human-equivalent AI and a supercomputer, you will NEVER be able to accurately machine translate anime or manga. Japanese and English simply aren't compatible in that way. It's a highly context-based language spoken/written by a people who LOVE to be vague and noncommittal, whereas English is almost entirely syntax-based, spoken by people who are generally considered worldwide to be direct, if not overly frank.

And that's ignoring the fact that the entence structure is backwards, meaning you can't translate a spoken sentence from J to E until the speaker finishes it, which is why people who can interpret Japanese simultaneously get paid hundreds of dollars a day (for a few hours work).

And it's also ignoring the fact that you need an encyclopaedic knowledge of traditional, pop culture, and scientific terms to translate manga/anime/games. Or at least the ability to search google and interpret the results contextually. Neither of which a computer program has, yet.

You might be able to translate/interpret reasonably well between Japanese and Korean because the grammar and some of the vocab is similar.

But you will never get an algorithm-based J>E translation that's even as good as 95% accurate for translation of media, because that level of translation requires real understanding, which only humans are capable of (so far).

Of course, a lot of fan subs/scantalations are only about 90% accurate... but that's another story.

E>J is by comparison much easier if you only care about an accurate direct translation, assuming you don't care about pop culture references and colloquialisms.

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simona.com wrote:

problem is, google translate really sucks at Japanese

How are you so sure, maybe the translate problem is the same for other languages too (french, German, Russian, Korean, and maybe even Chinese).

How are you so sure, maybe the translate problem is the same for other languages too (french, German, Russian, Korean, and maybe even Chinese).