The Gakken mini blocks blog

[Frankje]

Hi all,
I've just started a blog around this system.
You can find it here : http://gakkenminiblocks.blogspot.be/
I've started translating the manual into English, since Japanese is like chinese to me
Luckily, there is google translate to help me in translating.
As soon as I have some pages, I will publish them in my blog.

[MarcEE]

Hello Frankje,

that translation looks awesome!

How did you manage to do this economically?

I am sitting here on a programming manual of an old games console which I would love to get
translated.

The tedious work seems to be to extract the japanese characters from a scanned file
into a text file. I tried an OCR website once, but the result was not that good.

Also google translate was not that good in translating the technical terms, I am not sure
if the OCR was garbled or if this is a general problem.
It only worked with the preface of the book, this result was somewhat understandable.

My 2 years evening course of Japanese did not help much either, that would probably
need some more years.

Regards,
Marc

[Frankje]

Hi Marc !
Well, I scanned all pages in max. Resolution (600 dpi) with text recognition enabled in Japanese.
Afther that, I used the free version of Adobe Photoshop cs2 to erase all Japanese and to insert English text. I used google translate to understand the Japanese of the scanned PDFs.
I tried to stay as close as possible to the original and I used my own words.

The assembly manual was completely from scratch with Microsoft word. Afterwards I realised that scanning and replacing text was much easier :D

I would like to help you with your translation, if needed.

Something completely else, I found a cheap radio kit on eBay : http://www.ebay.com/itm/310930976499?rmvSB=true
I ordered one, seems nice to build

Greetings

[MarcEE]

Thanks for the information on how you did it and the link to the FM/AM radio kit.
Recently someone posted a link to a similar AM radio kit in this forum

Modern logistics still amazes.
I should also check the chinese equivalent of ebay, the variety there might be different.

Regards,
Marc