Help:Translation
While this is an English language wiki, many of the official sources of Monster Hunter information have only been published in Japanese. This wiki translates that source material in an effort to make it more accessible to those who cannot read Japanese. The policies and tools are intended to assist editors in making those translations as helpful and consistent as possible.
The wiki is always looking for editors to translate additional sources or to improve the accuracy of our existing translations. Whether you speak Japanese or not, if you're interested in assisting please reach out to yuzucchinyan on Discord.
Translation Policies
- Wherever fan translations (anything other than an officially published localization) are being used, this should be clearly indicated to visitors
- Translations should prioritize preserving intent and information of the source material over style or grammar wherever a tradeoff is necessary
- Translations by a fluent Japanese speaker are obviously preferred, but where this is not feasible, translation by automated sources with manual checks can be substituted
- That this translation method was used and not reviewed by a Japanese speaker should also be clearly indicated to visitors
- Translations of Monster Hunter specific terminology (Monster names, character names) etc. that has been officially localized should match the official localizations
- These can be checked on the Localization Pages of this wiki.
- Translations of Monster Hunter specific terminology that has never been officially localized should be romanized with the modified Hepburn system.
Translation Warning Templates
The wiki uses one of the following two warnings on any sections including information from unofficial translations to make this information hazard as apparent as possible:
| Unreviewed Translation Information in this section comes from an unofficial translation that was not reviewed by a Japanese speaker and may contain errors. See Help:Translation for more information. |
| Reviewed Translation Information in this section comes from an unofficial translation. It was reviewed by a Japanese speaker but may still contain errors. See Help:Translation for more information. |
Translation Process Details
The wiki editorial staff attempts to translate printed source materials themselves whenever possible with the following process:
- Google Lens is used to extract the Japanese characters from a continuous piece of text within a source (a specific paragraph, heading, etc.)
- Google Translate is used to translate that piece of text from Japanese to English, using context to select the most appropriate translation from those proposed.
- The automated translation is reviewed for things that don't make sense, which could be due to (A) optical character recognition errors, (B) the automated translator choosing the wrong definition out of available alternates, or (C) a Monster Hunter specific term being used.
- Cases (A) and (B) are handled by comparing the original text to a Japanese-English dictionary such as Jisho.org, which can be used to either search for misidentified kanji by their radicals or to review alternate definitions.
- Case (C) is handled by looking for official localization examples (listed on the Localization Pages)for that term to ensure our translation is consistent. If no such official example is found, it is romanized with the modified Hepburn system
Ideally, after all of these steps a Japanese speaker reviews the translation, correcting any errors they find. As the editorial staff currently lacks the resources to do this for every translation, the two notices above are used to distinguish the state an underlying translation is in.
