Who?

Raghav Shankar, person. As may be evident from the content on this site, I like Japanese things. I also happen to like computers.

What?

This blog exists to document the things I do and to let the world at large know that I exist, in a more concrete way. I post my translations here for you to read and for me to lament that I can’t disable Disqus ads. You can find my technical articles on this blog as well (I swear, I’ll write more of those).

Where?

I live in Bangalore, India. If you’d like to contact me, send me a message at
warpspeedscp(at)gmail.com, and I’ll get back to you.

How?

Translation

Translating Japanese to English isn’t easy. Here are some tips to make it less of a pain.

• Learn Japanese grammar well.

  • This includes everything from tenses, verb forms, how particles work, sentence structure, just everything.
  • It helps if you are already familiar with similarly structured languages (most languages from India follow a similar structure to Japanese, though there are likely others that are similar as well), as you can more easily translate between such languages.

• Use Akebi.

  • Akebi is this really nice Japanese dictionary app for Android, which has a lot of very nice features.
  • It also has great support for Japanese idioms and stuff, and can even break up sentences into constituent kana for easy parsing.
  • Also, it doesn’t cost anything, is completely ad-free, and even works offline!
  • I use Akebi on my computer using waydroid, so I can easily do translation while I look up meanings on the side, like so:
  

• Don’t rely solely on MTL.

  • I won’t say not to use MTL tools, as I make regular use of Sugoi translate’s Japanese model (It’s truly amazing). However, it’s best not to rely solely on that, as ML models really aren’t smart enough to grasp all the nuance a sentence may have.
  • I will admit that these models have truly come a long way, and ChatGPT is a great tool for when you need something spelled out for you.
  • I find myself relying less and less on such tools for my own work, but MTL isn’t a bad way to start out nowadays, as long as you take care to edit the result afterwords, and double check what the words put together actually mean.

• Be in it for the long haul.

  • Quality translation takes time and effort, be ready to put hours into this hobby.

My Setup

I use a bog-standard gaming laptop, some version of the Acer Nitro 5.

Here are its specifications:

• A 11th gen i5 (11400H) CPU
• 32 Gigabytes of DDR4 RAM
• A 4GB RTX-3050
• A lot of storage. Terabytes.

I dual-boot Windows 10 on one puny 256 GB NVMe drive, and whatever the latest version of EndeavorOS is. It’s nice, like a better version of Manjaro.

I dream of the day I can stop using Windows forever, so I can delete that stupid gremlin in my hard drive that keeps messing with my UEFI boot entries.