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Old Feb 22, 2015, 03:11 PM
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Rew Rew is offline
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Default Best Japanese-English translation website?

Quick question: What's the best place on the web for Japanese-to-English translations? I know Google Translate is mediocre, and I'm guessing so is Babel Fish.

Jisho.org is far more helpful, however it only seems to work well at translating Kanji (not the other Japanese character types).

Does anyone know of a translating website that does it all, so to speak?

(I ask because, not knowing Japanese myself, I sometimes like to arrange the song titles on my personal playlists (for Japan-only OSTs) in English in a way that is as true to the spirit of the Japanese as possible, while also still looking like a proper localization--if that makes any sense at all.)
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Old Feb 22, 2015, 04:37 PM
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Depends on what you're translating honestly. But even so, for track titles, I find hand-translating (using dictionaries (WWWJDIC) etc.) to be the only reliable way to translate them in most cases.

For larger chunks of text I tend to use Yahoo! Honyaku, Excite and Google. I guess it stands between Yahoo! and Excite for me, but they're not all that much better than Google Translate in reality, and I don't think we'll see anything significantly better before these have matured.

OCN Translation (also a Japanese translation service) used to be significantly better than Google in some cases though, but they shut down in 2012, sadly...
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Old Feb 22, 2015, 07:30 PM
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Thanks, Nisto.

Yeah, it's track titles I'm after. Google is pretty good on the very basic ones like "Title Theme" and "Boss Battle." But sometimes you get those whoppers like some of the ones on the Super Mario RPG OST (e.g. "The Starlight Flower Shines/Blooms on Star Hill" or "Let's Do the Fluff-Fluff/Fukka-Fukka!" or "Goodbye Geno... ~ Seeking Dreams through the Window of the Stars") that I wish I knew of something more amenable for translating whole phrases/sentences.
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