Visual Novel help: Translation Tools for playing Untranslated Visual novels

For those that want to play untranslated VN’s for any reason E.g. The Vn you want to play will never get translated or you just want to play it before everyone else.  Now as a foreword, these tools will automatically translate visual novels but Don’t expect anything close to a perfect translation, I’d recommend that you either know some Japanese or have indulged in enough Japanese media, anime, listening to seiyuu you know stuff like that, to have somewhat picked up some listening skills (This is because most visual novels are voiced)

What you’ll need to do is download this

http://www.4shared.com/rar/vIfXec_V/Translation_Tools.html

A bundle of: Atlas v14 +  agth + ITH + Translation aggregator

Now what these are;
Firstly Atlas v14, a good machine translator what can translate automatically to a clipboard
Agth-(anime game text hooker) Is a text hooker it simply takes the text displayed and then gives it to a program like Atlas (I wont be going through Agth because I think ITH is better overall)
ITH-(interactive text hooker) Does the same thing as Agth, but is just better.
Translation aggregator- (TA) another translation engine, but grabs the hooked text and can give it to a number of other translators, such as Atlas, Bing, google translate e.c.t. e.c.t. (you’ll only really need to use atlas and one or two others though)

Extract all the files (I used WinRAR for this)

Please note that these programs will work with most visual novels way over 90% of them anyway.

-Now this is important to make full use of Atlas forever you’ll need to put the two cracks in the same folder where you installed atlas- MAKE SURE TO  READ THE READ ME,  now when you first try to install Atlas it will say that the trail ended sometime in 2010 , what you need to do is change your date setting to before it says the trail ran out for example sometime early in 2010, it’s easy to do and you can just change your date back to current day after it’s installed.

Now for the good stuff.

Ok so first open ITH and Translation aggregator

(When you first open TA there will be lots of different translators, you only really need Atlas, JParser and  Mecab open , more about JParser and Mecab later)

Then open your Untranslated visual novel

(I’ll just use Cartagra, by Innocent grey for the example VN; Notice how I’ve aranged TA and ITH around the window, I do this because it just takes up less space on my screen)

Now when your vn is running just click on the ‘ Process’ button on ITH it’ll come up with all your running processes, you just select the visual novel .exe, then simply select ‘Attach’ after clicking on attack you will be able to ‘Add profile’ this will make ITH auto attach onto the visual novel next time you run it (with the newest version of ITH anyway)

Make sure to go into ‘Option’ and tick Auto copy to clipboard for obvious reasons.

Play the game Till you get some text.

once some text pops up you’ll get more hook options from the list of hooks (there can sometimes be alot of them) pick the one that has the exact same text as what is in the game, Don’t pick one that had double characters e.c.t. use your head and pick the sane option.

And if all go goes well you get some understandable English.

That’s the bare meat and bones of the basic stuff you’ll need and have to do to make this stuff work below I’ll go into some more detail about some little extra things you can do.

First of all as you can see ITH has a boring white background you can easily change it by following what’s written below, be sure to save the image you want as a .Bmp file or it wont work.

So you can go from boring and bland to!

(A moe background, or whatever you Want)

Mecab and JParser

Now fairly common problems with Atlas are that, the Atlas dictionary may not have some Kanji in it at which point it gives you a really unhelpful [**] and that kanji can be read multiple ways meaning Atlas doesn’t always give the right one. Mecab and JParser help with these problems giving a slightly better translation, personally after having not used them for awhile then switching to using them, I’ve Noticed the quality of the translation is better (just still don’t expect great translation it’s still machine translated folks)

DL for Mecab

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mecab/

All you need to do is install, just make sure you choose any dictionary other than UTF16, so just pick one till it works.

JParser

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/edict_doc.html

A tad more fiddly than Mecab just go to ‘Current version & download’, grab either ‘edict2.gz’ or ‘edict.gz’, when I did this It came up as a bunch of random text, if it does this just right click and save as making sure to save it in the Translation aggregator folder in in the dictionaries folder

(I saved my edict2 file the same way and it works fine, I know theres alot of other crap I’n there but it’s not important)

After it’s all working, if it’s not it’ll say so in the JParser and Mecab boxes in your TA window.

Once it’s working you’ll notice that you’ll have highlighted text and that above Hiragana, Katakana and kanji you’ll have the romanji, this shows that it should be working.

If you with to change any setting on Translation aggregator it’s very simple, click on the “spanner” for what ever program you want to configure and you’ll be able to change font sizes, the colour that it highlights things e.c.t.)

So yeah that’s all the basic stuff you need to do, I’ll endeavour to keep this little help guide up to date (link wise and information wise) Though there are other programs you can use to translate Japanese visual novels, the ITH and TA combo seems to work the best for me. I hope this guide has helped. Please feel free to ask any questions relating to this guide via commenting I’ll attempt to answer any and all questions to the best of my ability.