Tuesday, October 03, 2017

A brief guide to Text Hooking and Machine Translation for Monmusu Quest: Paradox

If you want to play a cool new Japanese hentai game, but can't read Japanese, you're probably going to want some form of machine translation.  For a long time I used an AGTH + Translation Aggregator combo.  Unfortunately, Windows 10 and text hookers don't seem to like each other.  Any game I tried to run with AGTH attached imploded without starting.

"Text hooker, what's that?" you might ask.

In basic terms, machine translation for Japanese visual novels and RPGs has two components.  The first is the text hooker.  This "hacks" into the game while it's running and outputs text to your computer's clipboard.  This is then picked up by the second component, the translator, and automatically translated into English, usually by running it through one of Google's or some other website's machine translation engine.  Results may vary - automated machine translation is not a precise science - but what you get should be enough to give you the gist of what's going on.

Currently, I'm running ITH with a fix for Windows 10.

Rather than copy'n'paste someone else's work, here is a link to the guide I used:


I don't know who you are, OriginalRen, but many thanks for writing this.

ITH (the text hooker) and Translation Aggregator (the translator) are the important components.  Dictionaries improve things, but the various internet translators are usually enough.

Here are links to the various bits of software (bear in mind they might be out of date).


Follow the above guide to install them.  Make sure Translation Aggregator is automatically picking up from your computer's clipboard.

Right, now to run it with Monmusu Quest: Paradox.

First off, let's get the first hurdle out of the way.  Your computer needs to have the locale set to Japanese otherwise the Japanese characters will come out as gibberish and translation won't work.  You do this by going into:

Settings -> Time & Language -> Additional date, time & regional settings -> Region -> Administrative -> Change System Locale -> Select: Japanese.


After you've done this, you'll be able to play Japanese games on your PC (usually they don't start if your PC is set to the wrong locale).

Now, a swift pictorial guide on how to get machine translation up and running (I'm assuming you've already downloaded the software as per the guide above).

1. Starting.

Start up your game, ITH (as administrator) and Translation Aggregator.  They will give you these screens:

Game

ITH

Translation Aggregator
2. Attach ITH to the game.

You need to click on Process (button on the top left) on the ITH window.  This will open a new dialog.


You need to select the game from the list of processes (for MQ:P it's Game.exe), and then click on Attach.  If it works you should see the following two windows:



(Note: the last big Windows 10 upgrade screwed this up for me and I got a "failed to attach" message.  I don't know if or when this will be fixed.  I managed to get around it by reverting the last Windows 10 update, which might not be possible for some people.  If that's you, I can't really help here as I don't know who's responsible for maintaining ITH and where the fixes can be found.  If someone does, please post the links in the comments.)

At this point ITH is waiting for you do something on the game.  Do something in the game (any button press for the next line of text should do it) and ITH will show these 3 lines:


Now, if you go up and click on the grey bar with "ConsoleOutput" on it you'll see a dropdown box with the some new selections.  Select one of the "GetGlyphOutlineW" options (I'm not sure it matters; I usually pick the bottom one).

3. Clipboard to Translation

Now, go back to playing the game.  You'll notice the text will start showing up in ITH window (as well as a lot of other junk if you happen to be in one of the options/stats menus).


The bottom line should match what Luka is currently saying on screen
This text should now be automatically copied to Translation Aggregator.  That sends the text off to various online translators and pastes the outputs to the relevant windows.  Having multiple translators makes it easier to cross-reference and get a better idea of what the best translation is (automated machine translation being an imprecise science and all that).


And that's pretty much what I did to get machine translation up and running again.  Unfortunately, setting this all up can be a little fiddly and I'm not an expert or very knowledgeable on either ITH or TA, so I won't be able to help too much if you run into problems.  For those, you might want to go and ask on the relevant forums.

(Bear in mind, about 90% of those problems are usually people not setting their Locale to Japanese.)

Bonus: An English Translation

Okay, a partial English translation.  I keep linking to Dargoth.com because these guys are doing great work, considering just how much work there is.

The current patch they have for part 1 and 2 has most of the skills, items, and other mechanics stuff translated.  These are the things that are usually the fiddliest to translate with text hooking & machine translation, so I highly recommend using their patch for the game as it makes things way easier to follow.  Also, if you didn't get around to playing part 1, most of the main story is translated for that.

They also have a link for getting the most up-to-date translations directly.  I will warn that patching and tinkering around with the new files is fiddly.  I was able to fudge it into working after some trial and error, but it did involve a fair bit of tearing my hair out.  Search through the comments, or even post requests of your own, if you have problems.  Someone there will be better able to help you than me.

Hope this helps, anyway. 

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for taking your time putting up a guide for lazy people like me. Doing God's work.

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  2. Civildeviation04/10/2017, 09:48

    MEH, if ya haven't already, go play http://www.dlsite.com/maniax/work/=/product_id/RJ198900.html. On par with MGQ Paradox & Succubus Prison in my books, plus it might give some inspiration. Works well with chiitrans and google hack. Only real problem is that it isn't always clear where to go at transitions which is largely resolved here. http://www.ulmf.org/bbs/showthread.php?t=30906

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    Replies
    1. Heard good things about Lust Grimm. I haven't seen it surface on the English side of DLSite yet, but will definitely check it out when I can.

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  3. Civildeviation04/10/2017, 17:12

    In the event you didn't know, you can buy from the Japanese dlsite if you have a visa/mastercard and are logged in to a registered account.

    An overly complex guide for how to do it: I just used it for the registering. http://www.anime-sharing.com/forum/tech-support-talk-12/one-question-about-dlsite-jap-134665/index2.html All ya really gotta do is hit the register button, do the email authorization, log-in and buy with your CC.

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  4. Damn, this old guide you posted up seems simple enough, until I got to step 3-4.
    Anyone else having issues with the last steps as well?



    ReplyDelete