[HN Gopher] Segagaga Has Been Translated into English
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Segagaga Has Been Translated into English
Author : nanna
Score : 91 points
Date : 2026-03-08 10:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk)
| mghackerlady wrote:
| On one hand, I'm happy this got translated and love the
| dreamcast. On the other, this game is so weird I doubt the
| translation holds a candle to the original
| tom___n wrote:
| This is the first time Dreamcast owners can play it in a more
| understandable way (and I don't understand why some users are
| boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the translation
| work, but that's beside the point). Playing SGGG, we can all see
| how brave Sega was at the time. I'm still shocked that Sony had
| such good marketing around the PS2 launch, so users could trust
| them to wait - and NOT buy - a Dreamcast. The Dreamcast had
| already great games (Jet Set Radio! MSR! Shenmue! RECV! and many
| more!), great online features, and its architecture was so well
| thought out.
| ndiddy wrote:
| > and I don't understand why some users are boycotting the
| translation due to the AI used in the translation work, but
| that's beside the point
|
| Segagaga has a ton of obscure, referential, meta humor that
| isn't easily translated to English. The "cleaned up machine
| translation" approach means that a lot of this is lost. Looking
| at some screenshots of the game, the script seems stiff and
| overly formal, much like how direct machine translation of
| Japanese text reads.
| https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2jjromh55tf7pp7s4hsvurf4/po...
| Obviously it's better than nothing, but people are pissed off
| because the "edited machine translation" workflow leads to poor
| results, not because of some reflexive anti-AI bias or
| whatever.
| flykespice wrote:
| Is it possible for AIs in the future catch up those gags and
| meta humor in the language? Could the translation team have
| done a better job prompting the AI with the current
| technology?
|
| Afaik japanese media (manga) abuse alot the use of puns on
| its language due to the amount of homonyms on it.
| RobRivera wrote:
| Avante-garde will always be lost on an inferential
| technology because to 'get it' it needs to be trained on
| sufficient volumes.
|
| 67 67 67 67 67 67 67 67 67 67
|
| Edit: I may not exactly be spitting pearls, but passive
| downvoting for a genuine take on the matter based on
| professional experience in AI is a canary gasping for
| oxygen.
| nekooooo wrote:
| ai translations of japanese still miss the point and screw
| up / hallucinate articles and subjects between passages
| (switching genders, for instance, 3 times in one paragraph)
| RobRivera wrote:
| Based on what I read in the article, MT was used as an
| experiment and proof of concept, and dedicated translation
| was done for the full release. Was that not the case?
|
| Was the workflow MT -> human translation?
|
| If so thats honestly such a lazy followthru given the
| technical hurdles overcome wrt the font tech
| ndiddy wrote:
| From the Github repo
| (https://github.com/ExxistanceDC/Segagaga-English-
| Translation), the translation went through a process called
| MTPE (Machine translation, post-editing). This works just
| like it sounds. The initial translation is done with
| machine translation, then human translators review and edit
| the resulting translation to try to correct any mistakes.
|
| > What I call the "playtesting translation" -- a base
| translation that allowed the artists and playtesters to get
| started early and understand what they were working on --
| was developed using a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT
| 4o/4.5. That translation then went through a substantial,
| months-long human translator review. I don't think that the
| end product feels "machine-translated," but that's
| ultimately for you, the player, to judge.
| jsheard wrote:
| > MTPE (Machine translation, post-editing). This works
| just like it sounds. The initial translation is done with
| machine translation, then human translators review and
| edit the resulting translation to try to correct any
| mistakes.
|
| And the consensus among professional translators is that
| MTPE only saves time if you're willing to accept a half-
| assed result. For them to edit MT up to the standard of
| manual translation takes just as much expertise and
| effort as translating it manually in the first place.
| vova_hn2 wrote:
| > consensus among professional translators
|
| [citation needed]
| jsheard wrote:
| https://blog.gts-translation.com/2025/04/07/the-state-of-
| mac...
|
| > 12.08% [of translators] say MTPE produces high-quality
| output.
|
| > A significant portion (around 50%) of respondents do
| not offer discounts for MTPE work, arguing that post-
| editing can take as much time as traditional translation.
|
| > Among those who do offer discounts, the most common
| range is between 10-30%.
| laksjhdlka wrote:
| > And the consensus among professional translators is
| that MTPE only saves time if you're willing to accept a
| half-assed result.
|
| I have no particular interest in translation, but clearly
| when the person saying X is bad _depends financially on
| you not buying X_ , you must take their word with a grain
| of salt.
| pimlottc wrote:
| It's also used to shortchange professional translators by
| paying them a lower rate for MTPE jobs
| RobRivera wrote:
| Oh boo hoo.
|
| Just boooooo.
|
| Disappointed. Gif
|
| As a side bar, I found it funny how in a Stanford lecture
| teaching various routes to training llms on the Machine
| Translation benchmark, the sample used was a French to
| English translation of 'the teddy bear is blue' or
| something similar.
|
| After the lecture I reviewed the current production grade
| google translate...it butchered the translation
|
| I wouldnt trust machine translation.
| nekooooo wrote:
| i don't think the translators had any first hand experience
| with akiba culture of that time period, nor did they know how
| to speak japanese to actually research it (and most of those
| ezweb.ne.jp / imode sites are long gone)
| thiago_fm wrote:
| The reason the PS2 was successful it was because it was very
| easy to unblock it and use pirated games.
|
| The Dreamcast wasn't as easy as I can remember.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| What are you talking about? The Dreamcast didn't even have
| adequate copy protection. I switched my entire collection to
| backups at some point to preserve the integrity of the
| original discs.
| jsheard wrote:
| It was much _easier_ to pirate games on the Dreamcast - the
| copy protection was broken to the degree that you could burn
| a game to a CD-R and have it Just Work without modifying the
| console in any way. It being both a total piracy free-for-all
| and also a catastrophic commercial failure doesn 't seem to
| fit what you're saying.
|
| Not to say that easy piracy is necessarily a death sentence
| for a console, the DS succeeded in spite of ubiquitous and
| cheap flashcarts, but the Dreamcast shows it's not
| necessarily a path to success either. There are just more
| pertinent reasons for a system to sink or swim.
| httpsterio wrote:
| Lol what? You got it the other way around. Also out of the
| dozen or so friends in my friend group who had a PS2, none of
| us had a modded PS2 or pirated games.
|
| The PS2 was popular on its own and it wasn't related to
| piracy.
| tom___n wrote:
| In models built prior October 2000 - it was very easy, just
| boot up Utopia loader and then you were able to run any game
| from CD.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I think that it was a game player and a DVD player had more
| to do with the success of the thing. Oh and it plays psx
| games too.
|
| I owned both. The graphics/games were of similar quality.
| Having a larger game storage gave the ps2 a decent advantage.
| The dreamcast seemed more interesting. But the PS2 had a
| better customer feature set.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the
| translation work
|
| Non-AI translators had literal decades to step up and do this
| and didn't so honestly who cares what they think about it.
| vessenes wrote:
| As someone who owned a dreamcast and stayed in line all night
| for a PS2, I can say that the DVD player functionality was
| HUGE. It was many, many people's first DVD player, and priced
| so that the game console was nearly 'free' on top of it.
|
| The Dreamcast still got played post-PS2 purchase, but not much
| - fighting games, mostly. PS2's catalog was very, very strong
| and the combo just dominated.
| Anonyneko wrote:
| Amazing technical achievement, and also a very unfortunate
| situation with the reliance on AI translation. I'm not privy to
| the details of the actual translation process (whether AI
| translation was really just a technical placeholder or actually
| the draft for the real translation), but the criticism online has
| been scathing.
| eltondegeneres wrote:
| The article says "Something important that should be clarified
| before we move on is that machine translation (specifically a
| combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5) was used during the
| initial hacking phase for testing purposes. Once it was time to
| translate the game proper, multiple human translators then took
| over."
|
| Fan translations have used Babel Fish or similar during the
| development process for decades. If the final script isn't AI
| translated I don't see any issue with that.
| Anonyneko wrote:
| This statement still, unfortunately, doesn't clarify whether
| the final translation was MTPE (machine translation post-
| editing) or translated from scratch by humans. I'm not a
| professional translator, but according to those of them I've
| seen on Bsky and the likes, MTPE greatly hurts both the
| translation quality and, ironically, the translation speed.
| It also makes it easier to accidentally recruit translators
| who don't have a decent enough grasp of the source language.
|
| Screenshots of the translated game do give an impression of
| edited - or even, at times, unedited - machine translation.
| What with overly direct word-by-word translations, as well as
| reasonably obvious references (which the game is chock full
| of) getting mistranslated as something else entirely.
| Although those screenshots, of course, are not necessarily
| representative of the whole script, which was a collaborative
| effort by many translators.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Yes the real achievement here I think is the creation and
| public sharing of the translation tools. The AI translation
| here should be considered effectively a proof of concept of the
| tools.
|
| Given the particular nature of this game, so reliant on inside
| jokes requiring a knowledge of SEGA history, it's likely an AI
| translation could miss a lot, and I think the community will
| eagerly await further real translations done by professional
| translators leveraging these tools.
| Anonyneko wrote:
| I hope so... but in the fan translation world the first
| translation is almost always the only translation, and the
| only one most people will experience even in the exceedingly
| rare case of an alternate translation coming into existence
| (as only the first one ever makes the news).
| sublinear wrote:
| > this really was the white whale translation of the Dreamcast
| library, _there was a lot riding on this project_
|
| I don't understand... _what_ is riding on this?
|
| I have never heard of this game, but based on this blog post I
| can see why it's a "white whale". It's precisely why I don't
| think this was a good use of AI at all.
| lkozloff wrote:
| For those unfamiliar, 99% Invisible + Hidden Levels did an
| episode about the backstory of development of Segagaga that is
| really worth a listen. I really enjoyed it... and without having
| listed to it months ago wouldn't have even known what this
| headline was about!
|
| https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hl-06-segagaga/
| RobRivera wrote:
| This is absolutely amazing and I can't wait to deep dive on this.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| It's a shame to see all the pearl-clutching about the use of AI.
| I've been playing ROMs and fantrans since the early aughts, and
| we were content back then when some of our desired games just got
| _menu translations_. I 've watched a ton of projects spring up
| around the games people wanted to play, only to stall or die out
| because the majority of the project people were programmers, and
| the one translator was a college student enrolled in Japanese 102
| who flaked out.
|
| Human translation should obviously be the end-goal, particularly
| in a text-heavy game from the 32-bit era...but that shouldn't
| undercut the technical achievement of this hack, even if the MTL
| text becomes little more than placeholder. Put it all up online,
| make it easy for someone to pick up the script and translate it
| independently _in chunks_ , and then insert it back in later.
| That's how a number of fan-trans were done in the past, if memory
| serves.
| threetonesun wrote:
| Also AI for translation is one of the best and oldest uses of
| AI, to the point where if this translation didn't exist, you
| could probably get by simply pointing your phone at the text
| and getting real time translations. An open forum for
| communicating back all the places people go "huh, that doesn't
| seem right" and fixing it is even better.
| jmcgough wrote:
| So excited for this - have been dying to play it for at least a
| decade.
|
| Now if we can just get a fan translation of London Seirei
| Tanteidan (PS1 RPG set in victorian England).
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(page generated 2026-03-09 23:01 UTC)