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 reap ad money from (Please don’t adblock this site, I promise you’ll only see a few banner ads and none of those inter-page ones). You can find my technical articles on this blog as well (I swear, I’ll post actual technical stuff someday).

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 genymotion, so I can easily do translation while I look up meanings on the side, like so:
  

• Use DeepL, or something like Sugoi Japanese Translator.

  • DeepL is great at translating Japanese into English.
  • It does come with some rate limiting, so make sure you don’t request too many translations at a time.
  • Sugoi is a better deal, imo. It can give comparable results, for free.
    • All you need to do is download the latest sugoi toolkit, hope your computer is beefy enough, and then run sugoi translator.
    • I’m on Linux, so some things just work differently. But you can hop on their Discord if you need help.
    • If you’d like to support the sugoi project more, consider throwing a few bucks at them on their patreon. You’ll get access to their latest translation model sooner and believe me, it makes a difference.
  • DO NOT RELY SOLELY ON ANY MACHINE TRANSLATION TOOL FOR YOUR TRANSLATIONS.
    • Bare MTL is annoying, and I’ve read enough shitty 10-minute tl jobs to know. I only use tools such as DeepL to clear up any confusing bits I come across. Machine translation, even with the fancy AI stuff we have nowadays, is unable to figure out context properly. And puns are pretty much obliterated, usually.
    • My goal is to provide a quality translation comparable to what competent teams such as J-Novel club (They genuinely have the best publishing model ever) provide. That doesn’t happen without going through the text word by word, and truly understanding the author’s intent.
    • It takes a lot of time since I’m doing things alone (and real life isn’t going to wait around for me either), but it’s worth the extra effort.

• 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
• 24 Gigabytes of DDR4 RAM
• A 4GB RTX-3050
• A 2TB Samsung SSD

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.