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:

How to Install and Run Untranslated Visual Novel Text Hooking Tools

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Here are links to the various bits of software (bear in mind they might be out of date).

ITH (normal)

ITH (Windows 10 - might be out of date)

Translation Aggregator

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. 

H-game Translations by =Together=

So I received an email that appeared to be a blatant plug for someone's Patreon.  After doing the obvious thing of immediately pressing delete...

"Translating Succubus Prison ~House of Lewd Demons~"

*pause deletion*

...after doing the obvious thing of reading and following the link to their Patreon, I decided to blog about it on the off chance of giving them a boost.

Here is a link to =Together='s Patreon site.  They look to be a two-person team working on fan translations of various low-budget hentai games.  Currently they're working on a translation for Succubus Prison ~House of Lewd Demons~.  You can also find updates on their progress at this thread on ulmf.org.

I had a brief look at Succubus Prison ~House of Lewd Demons~ back here.

It looks like a typical RPG-maker RPG, but is actually more of a puzzle game where you have to escape a house occupied by a trio of succubi before they snu-snu you to death.  It's a pretty good game and has some of the best Succubus Bad End H-scenes I've seen in any game.  It's also very confusing and difficult to play without translation.

Readers may have noticed I don't blog about Monster Girl H-games as much as I used to.  Since upgrading my laptop to Windows 10 I've had a helluva game trying to get any of them to work with the usual AGTH/Translation Aggregator combo I use for machine translation.  I was only able to play Succubus Prison at all because I bought it early.  Versions over 1.00 don't work with AGTH at all (at least on my machine).  So I'm really happy to see someone is taking on an attempt to translate it.

The usual caveats with crowd-funding apply.  There are always going to be scammers or idiots that think they can remake Monster Girl Quest as Skyrim with a dev team of one.  Even projects with good intentions and sensible objectives can sometimes go awry.  So always be careful to manage expectations before putting up your hard-earned cash.

That said, an English version of Succubus Prison would be awesome.

One last thing.  Regardless of the form the translated files take, if you play it and like it, please be sure to support Tokinokogiri and buy their game.  I'd rather they were happy to see attempts to make their game more accessible to the Western market rather than actively trying to sabotage them over fears of piracy (cough ROBF cough).