/rec/ - Weeb Help & Recommendations

You can figure it out on your own by using such sites as jisho.org where they have a handy dandy "draw the kanji" feature.

>>10449

https://kanji.sljfaq.org/mr-old.html is pretty useful, usually much more than "draw the kanji" searches for me.

Also consider OCR, though they rarely work well, and some of those it'll definitely fail on.

>>10453

I can tell you right now that 何 is nani, and I hope you don't need Jisho to know what that means.

>>10492

>You can even paste entire sentences into jisho and it generally does a pretty good job parsing them into individual "words" you can then read the definition of.

I don't know about that. Take as an example sentence pulled from an H doujin the sentence "ここのみんなは目的の本しか見えてないみたいだから", and plug it into i) Google Translate, ii) Bing Translate, and iii) Jisho.

Bing produces a translation that is grammatically and semantically valid English, and makes complete sense in context (an exhibitionist at Comiket).

Google produces a valid English sentence, but not one that makes real sense.

Jisho fails to even break down the clause "ここのみんなは" correctly, and that's something most anime watchers wouldn't need to plug into a translator in the first place.

If you really want to translate Japanese without knowing Japanese, you should be using many different tools and cross-referencing them with each other to build a translation yourself. Computers will give you the pieces, but you should not expect them to put it all together for you, and you need to be aware of both the context for what you're translating, and the limitations of the tools you're using. Even so, sometimes you'll hit a wall and have no idea what is being said.

Disclaimer, I don't speak Japanese at all, and I have no way to tell if my "curated machine translation", or whatever you want to call this technique, actually works.

>>10498

>If you really want to translate Japanese without knowing Japanese

Stop right there.

You can't translate any language without knowing it, don't even try. Japanese is especially bad for this because of how context dependent it is. I gave the jisho suggestion thinking of sentences with a lot of jukugo because that's what it's reasonably good at, but you still need to know a little bit of the language for things like ここのみんなは which you gave as an example. Jisho is still just a dictionary, not machine translation.

Depending entirely on machine translation is bad practice in the first place, so don't even consider it. You might get some decent results occasionally but if you let that trick you into thinking it's actually reliable you'd be making a mistake. The "technique" might work for a few common and simple sentences, but for anything that takes the least bit of human reckoning to solve they will either give you gibberish or, worse, give you something that seems valid but is actually completely wrong and you have no way of knowing better.

>>10499

True, but sometimes when Chapter 4 of that H doujin series still hasn't been translated since it came out in 2013, it's tempting to say to hell it with it and give it a shot since it'll never get a real one.