DMP '25 Week 14 Blog: Refine Japanese Translations: Improved Kanji–Kana Balance & Machine Translation Markers #494
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pikurasa
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pikurasa
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The "et --hard HEAD2git reset --hard HEAD2" file shouldn't be here as well as the "git" empty file. Please remove those.
Also, please address the comments about bold text and the comment about "Kanji".
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| ## Mentor Feedback on Japanese Translations | ||
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| This week, I received valuable feedback from mentor **Devin Ulibarri** regarding the Japanese translations. He noted that many of the generated strings were **phonetic translations** rather than proper contextual ones. |
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Please remove the bold text here. It smells strongly of a machine-generated artifact.
| This week, I received valuable feedback from mentor **Devin Ulibarri** regarding the Japanese translations. He noted that many of the generated strings were **phonetic translations** rather than proper contextual ones. | ||
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| Devin explained that the Japanese language employs three writing systems: | ||
| - **Hiragana** and **Katakana** (phonetic alphabets) |
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I'm /ok/ with the bold text here, if you believe it is necessary.
| - **Hiragana** and **Katakana** (phonetic alphabets) | ||
| - **Kanji** (logographic characters derived from Chinese) | ||
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| He clarified that in Japanese educational contexts, **kana** (Hiragana/Katakana) is used for younger readers, while **Kanji** is used for more advanced readers. For Music Blocks, we aim to use Kanji where appropriate—so that the translations are natural to fluent readers—while keeping kana for child-friendly UI strings. |
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Please remove the bold text here. It smells strongly of a machine-generated artifact.
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| ## Reflection | ||
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| This week was about **listening, refining, and improving**. Understanding how Japanese writing systems interact with user experience helped me bridge linguistic nuances in AI translation. |
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Please remove the bold text here. It smells strongly of a machine-generated artifact.
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| ## Translation Prompt Refinement | ||
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| Based on this feedback, I revisited and **refined the translation prompt** used in my Selenium automation script. |
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Please remove the bold text here. It smells strongly of a machine-generated artifact.
| ## Translation Prompt Refinement | ||
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| Based on this feedback, I revisited and **refined the translation prompt** used in my Selenium automation script. | ||
| - The updated prompt now encourages GPT to **prefer Kanji** for formal or educational terms while maintaining **Kana** for simpler UI elements. |
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Please remove the bold text here. It smells strongly of a machine-generated artifact.
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Also, this sentence is either a misrepresentation of your methodology, or it shows evidence of a misguided methodology.
We have two language settings for Japanese: one is "Kanji", which is intended for more advanced readers; and one is "Kana", which is intended for less advanced readers.
Our Kanji setting should always include some kana -- both Hiragana and Katakana. This is because intermediate and even the most advanced written Japanese includes kana. Kana, for example, will always be used for articles (such as noun marker は and object marker を).
So, there is no particular preference for "formal or educational terms" as you put it here. Rather, it has more to do with whether or not Japanese has a Kanji term for that word. In fact, because Katakana is mainly used for foreign words, a lot of specialized terms would be written in Katakana, because the Japanese language has adopted them from those languages.
Also, I think readers would be interested to know what the updated prompt is. I recommend that you either link to it in the code, or paste it here.
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This PR updates the Japanese
.pofiles for Music Blocks with the following improvements:These changes address mentor feedback and improve the overall quality and readability of Japanese translations.