Tutorial: How to Improve ATLAS Translation Perfornance

Well, eroge or galge fan that not Japanese native speaker sure has a same big dilema. They want to play their favorite game and vn but most of their fav title didn’t get translated into English, although recently group of people would kindly invented useful tools such as Translator Aggregator (TA) and Interactive Text Hooker (ITH) that would crop vn text to clipboard and translate it via ATLAS. Translation engine such ATLAS might cappable to translate such hirgana and katakana but sometimes ~ nope, I mean their translated often fragmented and difficult to understand that for sure would drop satisfaction level of playing experince.

Okay, this time I would give a tutorial to improve ATLAS translation by doing few config and provide dictionary update. I can’t promise your translation would be good as much as released english patch that being provided by yandere and tlwiki; however, it could make your ATLAS performance slightly better (better than nothing…)

Things to Remember before you merging your dicitionary:
1. Always merge into an empty dictionary. Don’t do the same mistake as I did.
2. As an additional, if you already familiar with Atlas, you might want to try my translation style settings.

How to create an empty dictionary :
1. From Atlas menu -> Environment Settings -> Translation Environment Settings -> (choose your environment settings, ex: General).
2. In Dictionary Settings tabs, click “New” button.
3. Name your new dictionary, click “Create” button.
4. In “List of Available Dictionaries”, select your new dictionary and click “Use” button. The selected dictionary will be moved into “Dictionaries Used” listbox.
5. Remove your unused dictionary by clicking “Don’t use” button. Usually “User dictionary0001″.
6. Click “OK” button. Now, you can choose to overwrite it or save as new environment.
7. If you saved it as new environment then don’t forget to assign that environment in TA too. But only do it after merging is done, just note it for now.
8. Now you’re ready to merge dictionary.

How to merge dictionary :
1. From Atlas menu -> Dictionary Tool -> Management Menu -> Merge Dictionary Data.
2. Click “Add” button to add file.
3. Now select your empty dictionary by clicking the “Dictionary Name” dropdown listbox at the bottom.
4. Make sure you selected the correct dictionary name, because you can’t undone it if you made a mistake here.
5. If you’re ready, click “Add Words” button to merge.
Note:
After merging is done, if error message pop-up saying some words error, ignore it. I think it’s Atlas’s bug, 1-2 failed words doesn’t matter anyway.

Translation style
I believe most people still using default setting from Atlas (General Translation Environment).
In this setting, all sentence is translated into a passive form.
However, to make it more “natural”, you can change it into an active form.
To do that you can follow my setting (see pic), I call it “a simple chat” because everything is simplified.
You might want to try it.

To show this window :
1. From Atlas menu -> Environment Settings -> Translation Environment Settings -> (choose your environment settings, ex: General)
2. Go to “Japanese to English” tab.

By clicking the “Translation Style” button, this window will appear :

TA config
You don’t have to follow it, because it’s always changing depend on game’s quoting mark mode.

To show this window :
1. In TA – Atlas box, click the “Configure” button (button with a wrench icon).
Don’t forget to select your new Translation Environment if you made a new setting when creating empty dictionary.

TAHelper config
What’s important is, make sure to checklist the “Replace all names”.
I’m not using TAHelper plugin version, it should be working but don’t ask me if there is problem.

Additional notes
1. Onomatopoeic & mimic sound
A word like パンパンと is called onomatopoeic or a miming sound.
Since it doesn’t exist in English, so there’re many ways to translating it :
- by expressing it like in Japanese too, ex: with a “bang! bang!” sound
- by replacing it with an adverbal, ex: noisily
However, because it’s contextual, Atlas always made a translation mistake.
Ex: ニコニコと笑う
Atlas will translate it into “Smiles with a smile” or “Smiles smilingly”.
It looks funny, it’ll better with “Smiles widely”, however where do you put “widely”?
Because ニコニコ already translated as smile too. The only way is to add the entire sentence as new word, ex: ニコニコと笑う -> v5u vi/vt, “smile widely”
However, by adding new word like that, it could break on a more long sentence.
That’s why I leave it alone be translated like “Smiles with a smile” or “Smiles smilingly”.

2. Names
When you play a new game, obviously you must register every name. It’s annoying, but you must do it to make Atlas translation better.
Atlas is ignorant, but you can improve it better if you have a will.

3. Particles
Based on my test, there are a lot of particles which is if combined with another particles, that will make Atlas translation breaking.
Ex:
くらい、ほど、こそ、いざ
Currently I don’t know how to solve it.

4. Untranslated text
Sometimes you will find Atlas didn’t translating the text, instead it gives a Japanese character.
It means the text is a partial word. A partial word doesn’t have any meaning, unless it’s combined with other word.
Ex:
というか、かしら、です
Because those words are contextual, so when used alone, it can’t be translated by Atlas.
Surely, if you read it on any dictionary, it’s translated. Like というか as “I mean”, or かしら as “I wonder”.
However it’s marked as an expression (exp), and adding an (exp) directly to Atlas is not safe.

ATLAS DICTIONARY UPDATE

as for ATLAS dictionary update please refer to this link: FHC user dict

That’s all, have fun with your game