2018-07-29 22:20:22

Is anyone else experiencing the issue where most of the time JGT fails to work and instead beeps to itself for 30 seconds, then says maximum number of retries exceeded? We just kept having that happen while trying to stream shadow line. One or two translations would work, then the 3rd would throw that error.

<Insert passage from "The Book Of Chrome" here>

2018-07-30 14:26:10

@Sergio_rama, I'm not sure why that would happen.
You might try removing any non English characters from your password and see if that makes a difference.
I thought I was handling unicode correctly, but I am not infallible.

@pitermach, I tried JGT with ShadowRine this morning and it is very responsive for me.
Is this a consistent issue for you, or has it gone away?

~ Ian Reed
Visit BlindGamers.com to rate blind accessible games and see how others have rated them.
Try my free JGT addon, the easy way to play Japanese games in English.
Or try the free games I've created.

2018-07-30 16:52:43

Hi! A couple of days ago I encountered the same problem of 276, but now everything works as expected.

2018-08-01 16:51:43

I have implemented a local cache for JGT.
This allows people to play offline as long as they are only encountering text included in the cache, for the target language they are using.
Because JGT needs to undo string combinations that the games perform internally, creating a local cache is not nearly as easy as people might think, nor is it a very good idea to clean up the translations it has.
The local cache comes built into the latest version of JGT, 2.0.3, and includes everything in the DB since I reset translations to benefit from the neural machine translation technology.

@threeblacknoises, and others wanting better human translations, the best way to do that is to get the game creators to expose language files, and to pay a bilingual individual to perform the translation.
This lets translators work on the text before the game combines strings together, which will be a much better translation / cleanup process.

Here is a link to the latest version of JGT for your convenience:
https://BlindGamers.com/downloads/JGT.nvda-addon

~ Ian Reed
Visit BlindGamers.com to rate blind accessible games and see how others have rated them.
Try my free JGT addon, the easy way to play Japanese games in English.
Or try the free games I've created.

2018-08-02 02:47:12

so this new local cache thing has like some of the untranslated parts of bk3, shadow rine, etc right? That would have to be huge.

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An anomaly in the matrix. An error in existence. A being who cannot get inside the goddamn box! A.K.A. Me.

2018-08-02 03:09:49

No not really, the addon is only 4 MB or so.
And, it's plain text, that's not that big; you can fit an intire novel into about 3 mb or so...
I worked on the translation for bk3, and it was only about a meg or so, and the addon would have to contain an intire translation of bk3, as it has to work for people who haven't bought the translation from Yukio.

At Ian, how would this built-in cash be updated. Do we need to log in to the server?
Later!

2018-08-02 06:01:56

My only complaint about local cashes is that if it is indeed possible to go in and mess with the translations, the translation project for BK 3 that was and is being worked on will no longer be viable, as less people will buy it if there is an alternative which puts most of our hard work to shame, unfortunately.
Ian said that:
Because JGT needs to undo string combinations that the games perform internally, creating a local cache is not nearly as easy as people might think, nor is it a very good idea to clean up the translations it has.

This makes me feel a little better, at least. Just as long as people remember that with this addon being around and with tidier translations that the addon is now capable of doing, there will be less reason for Japanese / foreign developers to translate their games. Just sayin...

Discord: clemchowder633

2018-08-02 11:13:05

It turned out the issues we experienced with JGT were due to network connectivity.

Anyway like I said in another thread, thanks a lot for the caching feature. It will make certain things go quicker, I'm mainly thinking of things like menu navigation or really repetitive information like battle messages in the text RPG's.

For those wondering I suspect the cache works the same way as in A hero's call. So the ad-on doesn't come with any translations by default. After you log in and start translating, any results get saved to your disk in the cache, so the next time you restart your computer and continue playing a game and JGT encounters a string that it already went online to translate, it'll just get it from your local cache that will get bigger as you play.

With how awesome this system is I definitely think there's room for translations. Caching isn't perfect, you have the string comparisons Ian mentioned but also the fact a proper translation is completely offline, while with the cache if you haven't ever gotten to a certain part of the story, and later want to play a game while you don't have internet access you just won't have any way to translate at all. Also, simply the fact that the ad-on is tied to NVDA can be limiting. What if you don't use NVDA but still want to play a game with SAPI? Or if you have a Mac or Linux computer and want to play with Wine? With BD3 and its official translations it's not a problem because you can just tell it to use SAPI and it'll work fine on Wine.
Lastly many games have visuals, for instance Audio Strike, Shadow Line or Planet Saga. Because Audio strike is translated, I can stream the game or show it to sighted people and as long as they know English they can play and understand it fine. With the Galaxy Laboratory games it's more difficult, because even though I can get NVDA to translate what the games are saying in Speech, anyone looking at the screen is going to be stuck reading the original Japanese text.

So in summary JGT is an awesome ad-on and I'm glad we have a caching feature, but I'll still be more than happy to support official translations and think we need more of them (looking at you MM) ☺️

<Insert passage from "The Book Of Chrome" here>

2018-08-02 14:18:29

Defiitely all good points, but the lammering for more translations... as I've said many times before, people don't seem to realize how much, both in time and money, it would cost. It's easy for the gamers to say that such and such deveopers need to translate their games now or in the future... but who is going to translate those games? Just pulling some people from the comunity who can clean up Google's messes isn't providing a quality translation, that's just cleaning up the bad translation given by a computer without all the proper uances and subtleties that computers can't generate. Someone would either have to be paid, and translation services usually charge by word or line, so do the math. $1 per word, or even per line, which is probably the cheapest you'd find... or hourly rates. That person would also have to be bilingual. That's a lot of conditions to meet. And from the viewpoint of a Japanese developer, if we already have this addon, then why would they fork out the extra resources when we basically have the games working? NVDA and JGT are both free and both exellent, so it wouldn't cost anyone anything to play them at least on straight windows. Can't speak for the other systems... I actualy like the cashing feature as that'll make it easier for people. I'm just worried it will provide less inscentive for actual translations to be made. There are few enough fully bilingual people in this community. I'm not opposed to the addon, this is just an interesting angle of discussion. People should count up the costs before clammering for translations to be done.

Discord: clemchowder633

2018-08-02 15:44:45

I'll still take a human translation that's been cleaned up or done by hand over a computer translation any day, given bk3's storyline that I can now finally understand, versus shadow rine, yes it kinda works but if you're in the game for the story components it's kinda... Iffy.

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An anomaly in the matrix. An error in existence. A being who cannot get inside the goddamn box! A.K.A. Me.

2018-08-02 16:23:24

i'm just surprised no-one knows japanese well enough to translate it? if they had help with BK3 why not with shadow rine?

2018-08-02 16:57:42

There were three people who worked on the translation project until release... one is a native Japanese speaker with good but limited English, and one is a native English speaker with no Japanese knowledge who was working off the Google translations. I was the only one who is a native speaker in English with near native understanding of Japanese. And the reason, again, that other Japanese games haven't been translated is because it takes lots, and I mean lots, of time that not many people have. People need to get this through their heads... you can half-ass a translation, yes, but in that case you may as well use a computer-based translation service. A quality translation free of spelling mistakes and one that also cmmunicates all the nuances and subtleties of the Japanese language is something that is not very easily done.

Discord: clemchowder633

2018-08-02 17:54:42

@assault_freak, in one moment you speak of JGT as though it is a helpful service for the community, but then you blame it for Japanese developers not wanting to create higher quality translations.
From my perspective JGT has allowed many more non Japanese blind gamers to enjoy the great Japanese games.
This seems like a very good thing to me, as many more people get to experience these quality games, raising the standard for quality games in the community in general, and giving the Japanese game developers a larger player base without any of the cost in time and money of developing hand written translations.
I think that without tools like JGT, instant translate, or QTranslate, far fewer people would experience these great Japanese games and so they would be much less popular.

You understand first hand the costs in developing hand written translations as you spent considerable time on the BK3 translations.
From my perspective JGT brings games from being mostly not playable, to very playable, with sub par translations for storyline.
This seems like an improvement to me in almost every way.
If an English translation was important and feasible for a Japanese game developer to begin with, I don't think a sub par story translation provided by JGT would stop them from continuing with it.
For instance, BK3's translation continued to be worked on even though JGT existed, and I think it turned out very well.
The JGT manual is very supportive of that translation, advising people to purchase them both to support Yukio's great work, and so they can enjoy the higher quality translations.
I have purchased them myself and donated extra when I did so, and I have also purchased them for other avid BK3 players I know personally.

Sure, Japanese game devs can say that since JGT exists they are not going to bother with a hand written translation, but were they really going to if it didn't exist?
Probably not, because it is very costly, as you well know.
So that would leave us with those games being not playable rather than mostly playabel with sub par storyline translations.
Consider the Planet Saga demo. If the developers are still spending their time to finish the game, would they be worried about an English translation?
I think not, which means without JGT or similar tools, non Japanese players would have to fumble through non translated menus, and with zero idea of what is happneing in the story, rather than a partial idea.
Or more likely, far fewer non Japanese players would enjoy those games, and they would be far less popular.

I don't think the local cache reduces incentive for hand written translations any more than the existing JGT addon did, other than players don't have to deal with the server being down or slow as often.
The cached translation records are from all Japanese games, so a translator could not choose one game to translate, they would have to guess which games the records are from, or just translate all games at once.
And as already mentioned, I advise people not to try cleaning up the JGT translations because of the difficulty of dealing with string combinations.
That sort of thing is much better handled by the game developer creating language files that let translators deal with the strings before they are combined with each other.
Also, your worry that community members are going to spend time equivalent or greater than the time you spent working on BK3's translation in order to clean up all the JGT translations, especially against my advice, and when your hand written translations are available at such a resonable price, seems a bit silly to me.
You know first hand how much time that consumed, so it surprises me that you would suggest it as something people are likely to do.

If you're just trying to make an argument that writing hand written translations is more costly than people realize, and so not feasible for every Japanese game, then I agree with you, and that is a big reason that JGT exists, to bring us from no translation, to a sub par machine translation.
I just don't appreciate you blaming JGT when cost in time and money is the larger factor in feasibility.

@threeblacknoises, the cache will only get updated when I release a new version of JGT, with new cache files.
It would have taken more work to get the addon to automatically download new cache files, or to update the cache on the fly.
I'm not an expert in Python, so I was going for the solution that accomplished the most, while keeping the work required for me as low as possible.
I already had to rewrite a lot of C# string splitting and substitution methods in python to get the local cache working at all.
That is some of the difficulty I mentioned previously.
It does not matter much though, since the English translation cache is already pretty saturated, so running into non translated text is pretty rare.

@pitermach, thanks for the appreciation, I spent a lot of time getting the local cache working, so it is nice to hear people say thank you.
It actually doesn't work the same as the AHC cache.
JGT already had a local cache that kept the last 200 results in memory to make menu navigation faster, but did not save them to disk because of my unfamiliarity with python and working within the NVDA addon environment.
The new JGT comes with a full download of all the translation records in my database, and a port from C# to python of most of the string splitting and substitution code that the server usually performs.
People really should be able to play offline most of the time with the new version of the addon.
AHC was supposed to have a feature that automatically downloaded the latest full cache when you switched to a different language, but I ran out of time to implement it.
Agreed there is definitely room for hand written translations.
If ShadowRine or Planet Saga had hand written translations, I would happily pay for them, and encourage others to do so as well.
Despite my disagreement with assault_freak about JGT being the reason we don't see more hand written translations; I very much appreciate his work on the BK3 translations.

~ Ian Reed
Visit BlindGamers.com to rate blind accessible games and see how others have rated them.
Try my free JGT addon, the easy way to play Japanese games in English.
Or try the free games I've created.

2018-08-02 18:11:39 (edited by assault_freak 2018-08-02 18:14:49)

I'm sorry Ian. I didn't mean to pass it off as blame on JGT... I do think it is somethin good that has opened the world of Japanese games to non-japanese speakers, and there can be nothing wrong with that. I didn't mean so much to express that as blame as merely to state that there could be developers who see it as a sufficient alternative for future projects where they may have considered a translation if JGT didn't exist. This wasn't an attempt at a statement of fact, merely a theoretical one. Again, appologies for the way I wrote that.. it certainly wasn't intended the way it clearly came across. If I was to say JGT single-handedly destroyed our chances for Japanese games being translated, then QTranslate would have to be lumped into the same category.... and JGT has definitely done a lot more to give exposure than QTranslate has given how much easier it is to use.


Ian, you also said:
"Sure, Japanese game devs can say that since JGT exists they are not going to bother with a hand written translation, but were they really going to if it didn't exist?"

Well, that comes down to a developer by developer basis... and that's almost impossible to know. But the likelyhood of that answer being probably not is, to be fair, probably high. Especially if said developer isn't aware of just how much interest there is outside of the Japanese community. Yukio is a bit of an exception as he is actively involved in this community as well. So while I would say that it isn't categorically possible to say the answer would be no every time, that's probably generally likely... since there aren't many people with the capability or patience to do it for free. If I was paid and had the means and time, I would gladly sit down and translate the Japanese games...

"If you're just trying to make an argument that writing hand written translations is more costly than people realize, and so not feasible for every Japanese game, then I agree with you, and that is a big reason that JGT exists, to bring us from no translation, to a sub par machine translation."

That was my main point, but I stated it badly and again, I appologize for that. Hope the air is now clear... and the appologies will be accepted. smile

Discord: clemchowder633

2018-08-02 18:28:12

Thanks for the clarification.
I agree with everything you've just said, and I'm sorry for misperceiving your intention.
I do agree there might have been a greater chance of them making an English translation if JGT did not exist as an alternative, but also that there would have been less awareness of the potential interest in the English community, which might weigh in the opposite direction.
It is hard to be sure of the outcomes of those kind of "what if" scenarios, but I still feel JGT has been a large net benefit to the community.
Anyway, I appreciate your last post, and the other contributions you have made for the community, both in working on the BK3 translations, and in your helpful presence on the forum.

~ Ian Reed
Visit BlindGamers.com to rate blind accessible games and see how others have rated them.
Try my free JGT addon, the easy way to play Japanese games in English.
Or try the free games I've created.

2018-08-02 18:31:02

No disagreement from me about JGT being a huge net benefit! Translations or not, something is beter than nothing... and for most, as long as JGT exists, as nice as it would be for full translations to be made, the majority will probably be happy enough with it. And thanks for accepting the appology, and even moreso for your passion for bringing JApanese games to the spotlight as well.

Discord: clemchowder633

2019-02-12 00:26:00

I can't sign in anymore. It says invalid user name or password. Other people can't sign in either.

2019-02-12 00:59:51

I heard someone say on another topic that you must make another acount.

2019-02-18 16:05:51

Hi, Phoenix here. I cannot use the addon to play Japanese Games. I tried to log in and I got an error saying that it timed out. I uninstalled the addon and tried to install it, only to find out that I do not have the file anymore. I tried downloading it, but the website is not working. What is the problem?

Phoenix

2019-02-19 15:52:22

What are the three target languages it supports now?

Why do ghost hunters have to hunt ghosts? Well, there's a fear of being ghosted out there. They may need therapy as well as their ghost hunting kit.

2019-02-19 16:41:53

@phoenix1991
It apparently was a server issue which has been yesterday fixed, so both the addon and the website now work.
@mata
Currently the addon does support English, Spanish and French as target languages.
HTH

Kind regards!

Add me on battle.net and let's have fun, region is Europe, my BattleTag is: Hajjar#21470
By reading my post, you agree to my terms and conditions :P

2019-02-20 10:57:37

Hm, I just wish there was an alternative to play Chinese games that's better than qtranslate. But looks like it's not coming to this addon anytime soon. It's still the most awesome addon for japanese games though. Cheers.

Why do ghost hunters have to hunt ghosts? Well, there's a fear of being ghosted out there. They may need therapy as well as their ghost hunting kit.

2019-02-20 12:59:45

I just wish it was accessible without the need for constant internet access.
It's a little annoying to have to log in every half hour to. :d

Though our eyes may fail, our ears prevail!
User Karma, every little helps

2019-02-22 22:12:07

Hello I have a question about Bokurano Daibouken 3 I was listening leom everen's recording of the game on his yotube page and he was in level 6 of the game where you first flie the plane. when he was going through it where it was saying how high he was going and the speed it was telling him in English. but when I got to that level the voices was speaking the highth and speedin there language not English. so I am wondering how he was able to have that spoken in English and how I can do that as well. by the way the addon is really cool except I couldn't get that part to play in English. any help would be greatly appreciated thanks.

2019-02-22 22:37:17

@catfish1953... have you got the English translation dictionary that you buy from Nyanchan's website?
If so, make sure you have your in game language switched to English.

Though our eyes may fail, our ears prevail!
User Karma, every little helps