Translating Japanese to English

I currently work for Sony and that means I interact with a lot of Japanese people as well as documents written in Japanese. One of my coworkers moved from Tokyo to Los Angeles to help with her English skills. Unfortunately she still lacks a bit of confidence. Sometimes she will start with a document in Japanese and then use a translation program like Google Translate to convert it to English. Today I found myself needing to review several of her documents even though they had not been translated.

At Sony we need to be careful as to what translation services we use. While it is probably not a problem to use Google Translate, some of our documents contain company secrets and so we have set up our own large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI) service to help with translation. This keeps outside services from being able to review our documents and being able to deduce some of the projects we are undertaking.

Our private LLM is based off similar technology to ChatGPT and so some of the things I have tried will work on that publicly available service.

I logged into our LLM and selected what type of help I wanted. Some of my choices included General, Image, and Document as well as Translator. Naturally I selected the last one and it presented a dialog area where I could ask questions and it would provide a response. I started with, "Translate the following from Japanese to English:," and then copied and pasted a Japanese phrase from the document I needed to review. Before spitting out an answer, the LLM asked me to provide some context such as the intended audience. I mentioned it will be used for internal documentation and then it provided a translation. The English matched my expectation of what should be in the document and so I copied the text into the original document under the Japanese text.

Next I typed, "Translate:," followed by another Japanese phrase and the LLM replied with, "Certainly, here is the translation." It was so polite I wanted to start all of my requests with, "Please." I stopped myself from using such pleasantries knowing that the machine doing the work would ignore them. I also tried just copying and pasting the Japanese text without indicating I wanted it translated. Most of the time, the LLM would translate for me. Several times it responded with something along the lines of, "I'm sorry I don't know what to do." Simply prepending the phrase with, "Translate," would be all the instructions it needed.

I translated three or four documents rather quickly and could review them. The translations seemed clear and concise. I shared what I had done with my colleague and she is happy I took the initiative to get something done instead of waiting for her. She can now review the work done by the LLM and make sure it matches her initial intent.

My experience with Large Language Model AI impressed me today. I prefer to write my own documentation and so there are not a lot of other uses for the technology. It did do an amazing job translating a very difficult language like Japanese to English and is now my favorite technology for such jobs in the future. Should you need translation services, I highly recommend giving it a try.

Video Game Review: XBLAZE Lost : Memories

After a month or so of playing XBLAZE Lost: Memories, I finished the game on my PlayStation Vita this morning while waiting for service to be completed on my car. I mostly finished the game last night on the flight from San Francisco to Salt Lake City but had to watch the credits and final scene after the credits.

This is really the first time I have ever played a Japanese visual novel and I have to say it was kind of strange. It felt like I played 3 different games all nested within each other. The first game consisted of a well-drawn story where you mostly just watched events unfold between a group of teenagers that also fought magical bad guys. Then you had another story of two sisters in a completely different universe trying to unlock the secrets of their mother's death and father's experiments. Once again, you mostly just watch the events unfold similarly to a movie. Then the third game is a clunky 8-bit graphics treasure hunt with quizzes that sort of ties everything together.

While the game kept me entertained over the past month or so of flights, I can't say that I really enjoyed it. At least not to the extent that I have enjoyed some of the Telltale games where it feels like you have more control over the choices you can make. Towards the finale of XBLAZE, you do have to make a number of choices, some of which take you down a dead-end and you have to go back and redo them in order to finish. The fact that it came at the conclusion of the game confused me and I almost stopped playing the game prematurely. The thing that kept me going was knowing I only had two more trophies in order to Platinum the game and it would be a shame to get that close and not complete it.

In addition to the trophies, I continued playing the game because the dialog is entirely in Japanese with English subtitles. I spend a lot of time in Japan and am always trying to improve my language skills. By the end of the game I had a better comprehension of a handful of more Japanese phrases. I wouldn't recommend this as the only tool for learning the language as you won't pick up much unless you have a foundation to build upon.

XBLAZE Lost: Memories has an ESRB rating of M for Maturity because of Violence, Language, and Brief Nudity. The brief nudity isn't anything beyond well-drawn cartoon characters in skimpy swimsuits but I wouldn't recommend this game for anyone under the age of 18. It is available for the PS Vita, PS3, and Windows PC platform. I got the game in a bundle of PS Vita games I purchased for $5 and so I didn't pay much for it.

Unless you love Japanese visual novels or are looking to brush up on your Japanese language skills, I would not buy the game. If someone gives you a copy of the game and you are interested in a cultural lesson then go ahead and play it. Hopefully this has been helpful.

Google in Japan

Visiting a country where you don't speak the language can be a bit of a challenge sometimes. This is especially true in Japan where I don't even understand the characters. When I first got to my hotel here in Tokyo, I wanted to look up some of the sights near to where I am staying. Naturally I went to www.google.com. I was immediately redirected to www.google.co.jp. The user interface is so familiar that it didn't matter. I entered my search criteria and soon I was looking at a bunch of Japanese web sites. I didn't understand a single one and so I revised my search and added the word "English". That made all the difference.

Google owns a lot of web properties (such as this blog site) and so this instant localization occurs whenever I try to visit one of their sites. For instance, trying to log in to post today's blog, I had to figure out which one of the links was "Log in". Once I got in, the system is smart enough to know I prefer English over Japanese. Figuring out how to log in was the tough part.

When I first started working with a team based in Japan, I thought it would be enough to start learning a few basic words in Japanese. I figured that the written language would be too difficult to figure out and so I shouldn't even worry about it. The more I am in Japan, the more I realize that I may want to learn a few characters as well. I've only been here a couple of days, but I think I have "Search" and "Log in" pretty well figured out.