Viewing Jp Under Notepad/wordpad

Like someone mentioned before, you can use AppLocale to make the Japanese text show up in notepad. You just run notepad through AppLocale and set the language to Japanese, and it should show up. I've done it before because I wanted to see if they were talking bad about me. >_>

I would counsel against using an auto-translator program like Google Translate or Babelfish to see "if the JP are talking smack about you."

In general, these programs still have enormous trouble translating between languages that do not share a common linguistic base: i.e. English<->Japanese instead of say, English<->Spanish or Spanish<->French.

Their resulting translation is going to often be vague and hard to understand. The gist will likely be there, but there will be enormous room for interpretation in both intent, and tone. I have frequently seen them render translations that are unintentionally offensive through simply following word-for-word translations that are flat-out wrong in context.

If you go into it assuming they're talking smack about you, it will be very easy to read into it that way and confirm your fears.

http://www.excite.co.jp/world/

jp friends of mine saying this ones the best, personally i duno though since i can't speak it? lol ^^

No program is going to get your point across perfectly or properly translate slang, iditoms or other various things. There is a reason why good translations take a long time to get out and why they often have mistranslations even of official documentation.

You'll often have professional translators misinterpret things because they have to find a mirror example in the target language. Hell, how many times can vague language usage cause problems in english to english communications? This is why you'll often have translation notes in books, mangas and animes that are translated because it often takes explanation to understand what is being said because a word for word translation is often completely meaningless or even misleading.

As for technical issues with the language compatibility:

1- Shift-JIS is an MS developed/endorsed system based on existing specifications predating Windows itself. MS stuff still rely heavily on it because of historical reasons (read it as reverse compatibility).

2- Shift-JIS encodes types in 16 bit chunks opposed to what ASCII uses (7 bits or 8 bits characters in contrast of 16 bits used by JIS). Therefore it's possible what what's being copied over gets mangled by the clipboard when you copy as it will be treated as ASCII text.

3- As Jaerik mentioned, setting your OS to Japan as locale will cause a lot of things to show up in Japanese, like for example the Grahpic card drivers (nVidia control panel)...

If you setup your OS properly, by simply opening the FFXI logfile on notepad you should be able to see the Japanese and English text correctly and copy/paste will work. :)

Common sense and taking it with "a grain of salt" is important when using automatic translation services. Nonsense is what you will get most of the times. lol

So how's this going for you so far? I'm still using the same method, was hoping someone found a better way they'd like to share :)

I'm a bit confused by this thread, so wondered if you could provide some clarifications.

1) You're using a plugin called Logger (I know of it, but have never used it).

2) From what I recall, Logger saves chat text into a text file. At this point the encoding it uses when saving text is uncertain. I would assume it saves the original raw data (stripped of the additional code values that KParser needs, which is why KParser can't parse Logger files), which would mean Shift_JIS.

3) You wish to copy the text provided to another application?
3a) To browser for translate?
3b) To FFXI?
3c) Possibly copy other Japanese text back into FFXI?

4) You're viewing the text logger saves using Notepad. It is not decoding properly.

5) Secundes is able to view Japanese text in Notepad++ by setting the encoding to Shift_JIS.


Why are you taking the text from "loggers notepad" (What does this mean exactly? Does Logger have its own version of Notepad that you use?) and paste it into Notepad++ (which apparently makes it readable), and then copy from Notepad++ to a web page. Why are you not opening the text file in Notepad++ in the first place?


How is Logger using any particular font? That doesn't make any sense. A font is used by a program, such as Notepad, that displays text. Logger (as far as I know) does not display anything. You have to open the file it creates in another program. Therefore Logger itself is not (or should not) be using any particular font.

The default font for Notepad, however, is Lucida Console.

6) It was mentioned earlier in the thread that KParser reads Japanese text correctly. It converts the text from FFXI's internal Shift_JIS encoding into UTF-8 for display. Is there a reason using this doesn't work for you? (The post said the suggestion was invalid because of what he read in the other thread, but I don't see anything that correlates.)

7) If Logger is saving the original raw data that FFXI spits out (ie: Shift_JIS encoding), then it would be fairly trivial to write up a little program that would open a file generated by Logger and convert the text from Shift_JIS to UTF-8 and display it in a text view. However it would be easier to just open the file using Notepad++ (or even the browser itself; open the file using Firefox and select the encoding under the Web Developer/Character Encoding menu) and define the encoding to use for display.


If this doesn't match what you're trying to do, it would help if you could write an exact, step-by-step list of precisely what you're doing, and what you expect to happen at each step.