I don’t know, just what they said. I probably should have just let them explain lol.
so what about purpose made Japanese translators? any online, or even physical hanbdhelds?
trying to accidentally trigger me again!!?
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Since people here are posting somewhat snarky and off-topic answers here, I’ll just straight up tell you what the very best machine translator is: google translate. It’s not perfect by any means, not by a longshot, but it’s miles better than any other purely machine translator out there, so you don’t have to worry about there being another one under the radar that might be better. Hope that helps.
How much do you actually use it? Because I’ve attempted to use it a lot and I almost always just get rubbish. You can say it’s “the best”, but that’s not saying much since everything else is just more garbage.
Here’s one such example sentence from a manga that I’ve tried recently:
早めにきりあげて一杯ひっかけてから帰ろうや。
and the output from Google:
I’ll finish it up early and catch it as soon as possible.
The first half is reasonably close, but the last half makes no sense. It’s not talking about catching something, it’s about going out for a drink before going home.
And as to my statement about ending punctuation making a difference, here’s the translation when I simply remove the period:
Let’s go home early
It now doesn’t even fully translate the sentence and chops off the part about getting a drink.
And this is actually Google Translate doing a “good” job. I can provide plenty of examples that are far worse.
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Personally, I think that now question is irrelevant, because when you’ll start to apply knowledge in real books or articles, most likely you would have a number of them already translated to english.That’s when practice will really begin.You can try doing it now, but I doubt that with starter level there will be any help.
Not that Google translate is perfect, but mine says
“Did you mean: 早めに切り上げて一杯ひっかけてから帰ろうや。” → “I’ll round it up as soon as possible and catch it before going home.”
Google Translate has usually some trouble to infer sentences that are more likely written in kanji.
Punctuation makes a huge difference as well, you have to treat sentence fragments very differently, a full stop is actually a huge help.
Yes, but I input the sentence exactly as it’s written in the manga itself and it’s not really any better once you added in kanji. It actually seems more poorly translated. I’m not even understanding the “I’ll round it up” or where that comes from. The scene is about some construction workers leaving work early to get a drink because it’s snowing.
Edit to add:
Oh, Google Translate thinks 切り上げて means the 'to round up (a number)" meaning. Yeah, not so much…
Why can’t we just call it a period instead of a full stop
Google Translate is like that friend who always has an answer for any question you ask.
Unfortunately the more you learn, the more you realize that he’s so insecure that it’s impossible for him to say “I don’t know”, so he just makes something up if he’s unsure.
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I can only put more stress on this. Translators (machine based ofc.) should not be used as a learning tool. They are not accurate at all and will cause more harm than good (if any good). You might learn incorrect grammar and bad phrasing.
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Yeah, the issue I see is that it’s pretty obvious to dismiss translations that just obviously read as weird sounding English that you can easily guess is likely wrong. It’s the times when it outputs something that reads like natural English that will easily trick a new learner into thinking that it’s a good translation when it’s not.
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切り上げる also means to round a number up, why shouldn’t your sentence mean “Just let me round that number up and then go for a drink?” 
As the translator is not omniscient what the context is it has to do something with it. Being in a book doesn’t mean it’s not unintelligible slang.
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Glad you add the smiley. I was at first expecting you to be serious. 
And that’s why I raised my initial objection to using Google Translate. Since it has no way to pick up context, you will often get weird sentences where it tries to fill in pronouns and direct objects and just make a really bad sentence. Google Translate can do a better job if you stick to very textbooky Japanese where nothing is omitted and you use easy to parse out set phrases. If you input normal, conversational Japanese you’ll often end up with just garbage output.
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People too often forget that computer are dumb as f… It’s gonna be a long while, before they will be able to grasp context in such a complexe environment as natural language.
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What children’s book is this?
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the way I use google translate, is mostly just to get the gist of something, I have no idea yet how to parse.
For instance
早めに切り上げて一杯ひっかけてから帰ろうや → I’ll round it up as soon as possible(from google)
I can infer that it’s talking about finishing up what’s being done(work)
Then with a little more work, I notice 一杯, which is to get a drink.
I can then infer the whole sentence
Going to finish up work, then go out for a drink.
Without that, I wouldn’t really know where to start. There are a few kanji I recognize, and a few grammatical components I know, but not enough together to know what’s being said.
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I am serious Why shouldn’t it be related with rounding a number (for a computer).
If there were more examples in Googles database of translated JP-English pairs with this it would probably come up with a better choice of words.
For me trying to do something with anything is actually a feature. But the more malformed your input, the more gibberish of course.
Actually inputting the context would be a good first step.
But this is why you don’t trust the computer. Also if it was actually smart, it was realize that the 早めに is implying the meaning of to cut short, to stop early meaning.
But there isn’t anything malformed. This is just a natural sentence as it was written by the author.
Even the unnatural sounding English from weblio gives a way better approximate translation:
I will return after leaving it off early, and drinking one cup.
It seems to almost under stand the 早めにきりあげて correctly along with recognizing the 一杯ひっかけて as having to do with drinking something not catching something.
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Why is it relevant? I was just providing an example of a relatively simple sentence (at least the second clause) which google translate got wrong in a way that might not be obvious to the user. It was from にゃんにゃん探偵団.
The OP wanted advice on their method / approach, and I would strongly recommend they use a dictionary or parsing tool rather than google translate. If they want a good check of their sentences overall a service like italki would be a good idea.
I’m not trying to hate on google translate, which is grappling with an extremely difficult task and can sometimes be helpful. I just wouldn’t recommend using it as your go-to for translating sentences in Japanese.
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