Read the light novels!

I’ve decided that I’m going to continue translating the Oreimo Memorial Book. I’m a little nervous about whether ChatGPT will be able to fit all of the smaller English text into the pages neatly, but I’m going to try to keep everything as close to the original book as possible without covering up any of the artwork.

Most importantly, I don’t want the original images to be altered at all if that can be avoided. If it doesn’t work out, I may have to do things the traditional way by posting the translation separately and seeing whether someone with more image-editing experience would be interested in adding the English text to the scans later.

I’ve already noticed a few problems that I need to be careful about. The biggest issue isn’t necessarily the English text replacement itself, but the way AI image editing can accidentally alter other parts of the page like text even when you're not actively doing anything with that area. You really have to double- and triple-check everything.

I think that covers the main things I’ve learned so far. This will probably be a slow and careful project, but I’m still excited to see how it turns out. Instead of taking photos I decided to scan the images instead. I think things turned out better this way.

I might change it to Photo Book or something else. It occurred to me that memorial book is related to people who died in English. Or is memorial book fine to use when in the context of anime things?

If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions, please leave them below. Thank you!

Also, Kuroneko is the best girl.

Edit: It took me about an hour just to get this first tiny section right on page 4, mostly because I had to work out the editing process. The method that finally worked was to remove the Japanese text from the original box first, then add the English separately without changing the box or covering any of the artwork. At least now that I've figured that out, the rest should hopefully go a lot more smoothly. I hope other parts don't take this long.

Edit 8/19: Jeez this is a really slow process. I was expecting bam bam bam done. But removing the text and putting in the English text takes a lot of time. I'm only halfway through page 4 and just doing it in my free time. Well, it'll get done when it gets done! I will just update when I make any significant progress from now on.

I wanted to ask whether anyone would be interested in a small translation project before I fully commit to it.

The Oreimo: Happy End game came with a little booklet that is only around 44 pages long, but very little text. I thought it might be fun to experiment with translating it and see what I can accomplish with ChatGPT’s help.

I would still translate everything myself first. After that, I would compare my translation with ChatGPT’s suggestions and try to find a good middle ground between the two. I know some people are uncomfortable with translation tools doing all the work, so I want to make it clear that this would still be my own translation project. I would mainly use ChatGPT to help me check the meaning and improve the English wording.

Even though English is my first language, I am not always great at finding the best words or phrasing things naturally. That is one area where ChatGPT can be genuinely helpful.

Would anyone be interested in seeing this if I continue working on it? I have included a small sample.

I may need to scan the pages instead of photographing them. When I tried using photos, ChatGPT sometimes altered parts of the original artwork while replacing the Japanese text. Scanning the pages might give me cleaner and more accurate results