For those of you who enjoyed Atlus' excellent Persona 4 video game on the ps2, or its brilliant remake for the PS Vita, or for anyone looking for a good source for sentence mining, I found this little gem of a website yesterday : http://apps.lushu.org/persona/script.html#q=50

It contains a large chunk of the game's dialogues, and the majority of it has its official translation across the page. AND it's styled with the game's artwork. What more could you ask ? Oh yeah, and it's copy/paste-able for easy integration =)

There's a little bit of everything in terms of language level, some juvenile talk from your 9yrs old little sister to the overly prophetic and ominous speech of Igor. Most of it is colloquial everyday high-school / young adult speech though, but every character comes from a different background and has their own speech pattern and habits, making it a fairly varied source to mine through.

I thought this might be of interest to some of you =) And if you're even remotely interested in JRPGs or RPGs in general, I WARMLY recommend this game - especially the Vita remake. It's brilliant.

Brilliant! Will use this if I decide to buy the game.

I second this topic. Persona 4 is amazing and just plain out fun. It's definitely one of my favorite games.

The person did one for Tales of Vesperia too: http://apps.lushu.org/vesperia/

I knew those two awesome websites but I don't know what to think about mining sentences from "localized sources" instead of direct translation.

Kanken Wrote:I knew those two awesome websites but I don't know what to think about mining sentences from "localized sources" instead of direct translation.

I believe that as long as the sense comes across, it doesn't matter if it's a direct translation or not. On many native sources, a direct translation will just sound awkward anyway, if not plain impossible because of idioms and colloquialism. As long as you get an idea of what the sentence is about, it's enough - you can then rely on your own understanding of the target language to make sense of the sentence, with the help of a dictionary for the unknown vocab'. It helps getting away from systematically translating sentences in your head, or worse yet, from learning translations by heart ... it's a good way to start thinking in the target language itself.

Woah...

Any way to export this data?

Personally, I love learning from "direct translations" rather than localized sources. The reason being, localized sentences tend to take liberties with the script. There's nothing wrong with that, but when you're starting out it's best to have a 1-1 correlation so it's easy to identify unknowns clauses/phrases.

Kuzunoha13 Wrote:Personally, I love learning from "direct translations" rather than localized sources. The reason being, localized sentences tend to take liberties with the script. There's nothing wrong with that, but when you're starting out it's best to have a 1-1 correlation so it's easy to identify unknowns clauses/phrases.

Fair enough, though it depends on what you're looking for in a translation ; I tend to prefer using the translation as a hint rather than as a point of reference, so I'm not very picky.

The problem I have with 1:1 translation is that they are limited, by nature, to sentences that are easy translatable in your first language. Though useful (especially, like you said, when you start out, i.e. Core deck), I tend find them very artificial-sounding and frankly boring.

If you're Japanese is good enough, you should be able to follow the Japanese with the localised source acting merely as a helper to you better understanding the original text. You should not be learning it like A = B.

NinKenDo Wrote:If you're Japanese is good enough, you should be able to follow the Japanese with the localised source acting merely as a helper to you better understanding the original text. You should not be learning it like A = B.

Or the Japanese can help you understand the English, if the translation is bad enough.

Translation: "I must ask you to understand."
What it actually meant: "I must ask you (the following question in order) to understand (your character)."