How to Convert, Translate and Read RAW Light Novels without learning Japanese
>> Thursday, October 27, 2011
Light Novels (or Ranobe for short), is a style of Japanese novel in prose, written in short paragraphs for fast reading. Typically it is not more than 40,000–50,000 words long, rarely exceed 200 pages, are usually published in bunkobon size, and are often illustrated.
Compare to manga, light novel translators are very few – probably because of the furigana used, story complexity, licensing, sources, time constraints or simply prefer graphic novels and find books as boring. Of course it isn’t.
For those who can’t read RAW light novels in Japanese, just as what are available in my site, here’s a step-by-step procedure for those who doesn’t know how to read it.
For those who can’t read RAW light novels in Japanese:
1. Convert the scans to txt file
2. Use online/software translators
3. Read it.
CONVERT THE SCANS TO txt FILE
There are online applications and downloadable softwares that may aid you in converting it to txt file. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a vital program in converting scans to readable text. There are some printers that have OCR already but majority of these cannot read Chinese, Japanese, or Korean characters. In this case, you must install OCR that can identify Japanese characters like:
Online OCR:
WeOCR Project (with some links to their affiliated groups that also develop online OCR)
OCR Softwares:
nhOCR (recommended for Linux/Solaris user & there’s no need of installing Wine Emulator)
OCRopus
Smart OCR
There are lots of OCR – open-sources or licensed – available in the web. It is recommended to install Japanese language pack in your system since there are some programs that won’t work well without it.
USE ONLINE/SOFTWARE TRANSLATORS
Majority of these programs translates word-by-word with grammatical errors that it might be difficult for those who have low English vocabulary.
Online Translators:
Babel Fish
Babylon
Excite
Google Translate
Word Lingo
Software Translators:
ATLAS
EnamDict
Furigana Injector
Rikaichan
Translation Aggregator
Windows, Linux and Macs have translator widgets and pretty efficient of having an updated dictionary.
There’s a tutorial on how to read raw light novel using tools for more instructions.
There are lots of amazing websites, blogs and journal groups with amazing translators that provide good quality translations of some promising light novels. You have to search them in the web - and don’t forget to say thank you with their job well done ^^
4 COMMENTS:
Show/Hide CommentsAlternatively, you could just learn japanese lol,
Sorry to say, but you WILL miss out on a LOT of the puns/word-plays, if you use the method describe by H0shi. That is one of the beauty of ranobe, I'm afraid. you absolutely don't want to miss them.
Nevertheless, thanks H0shi. it's one awesome tutorial. Better than nothing at all. Someone might find this helpful.
I'm afraid I'm not one of them though :P
ShinOtoko: That's the biggest flaw of using this tutorial. Not only it reconstructs the whole thought, the figurative words loss its meaning.
This is for those who don't want to spend much learning Japanese.
There's a manga group who used this technique (not pretty popular) and their outcome sucks.
While it is true that you would miss out on word plays, etc., you should also consider that some people just want to catch the base of the story and do not have the means, or drive, to learn an entire language.
I'll agree with the statement that it isn't quite the same, but the ratio of translated light novels to tranlated manga/anime is considerably small, therefore most people who want to enjoy a good story that interests them actually have a method of doing so.
Excellent work posting this guide!
Anonymous: The best technique here is TRANSLATE IT TO ROMANJI.
Not only you may not miss the wordplays, you can understand the whole plot more than those who struggled reading it in its translated English. Some terms & names were missed out (and have weird translations) in their English conversion.
Though you still need to familiarize a lot of Japanese terms (there are words that have similar pronunciation with different meanings).
In my case, I convert a Kanji/Furigana to their hiragana/katakana I'm not familiar with. But there are some novels with hiragana/katakana beside a Kanji/Furigana - similar to a raw manga - so it's a hassle free for me.
The editors must be kind~
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