Reading foreign languages

While competition is coming from new Chinese companies, Japanese model manufacturers are still among the most appreciated ones in terms of model quality. The English translations of the instructions are not necessarily always to the same high standards, but usually are sufficient for getting the model built. Still, there is obviously more written in Japanese than has been translated, so, while gearing up for building Fine Mold’s Savoia S.21F (i e Porco Rosso’s flying boat), I thought it would be interesting to find out what all the text in Japanese actually said. A little exploration found two tools: NewOCR, an online service to convert images to text, handling multiple languages and alphabets. So that let me scan the text from the instruction sheet into Japanese text, which I of course still couldn’t read. The next step was to use Google Translate. There is a cool feature in Google Translate, that I discovered then, which is that you can actually draw, in this case, Japanese characters in an input window. This let me correct characters that had gotten corrupted in the scanning. Of course, the characters most likely to have been misread are also the most complex to draw. 翼 (wing) appeared quite a few times, and had to be redrawn manually.

Well, so now I should have a text in English that I could read? Well, of course not. As shown by earlier examples, machine translation is an inexact science, even for languages within the same Indo-european family, but translating Japanese into English tends to render nonsense, like: “Rui is distinguished simply referred to as "F-type" In that, but the repair work Whatever You're in which was whether to follow the Detection Ichiru Suppose that you try.” “In such Ime temporary, please enjoy the Italian machine of power Rahul ma one King between War.”

Interestingly enough, names, that should have been the same string of characters in every place, got translated differently in different sentences – sometimes as the correct Italian name, sometimes as whatever Japanese expression matches the Katakana transcription of the name. Presumably this has to do with the algorithms of Google, that sometimes recognise the context and insert the correct name, sometimes don’t realise there should be a name. I had hoped for at least useful translations of the colours, but “power over key” is the rendition of what we know as ”khaki”.

So, still not entirely helpful.