Chiitrans2 Review

To some of you who had been a hard lurker at my tumblr blog, you might have come across me linking to Chiitrans. It is an alternative to Translator Aggregator, and here’s what I think about it.

I’m using version 2.16.4505.2364 in this review by the way.

Update: I made a tutorial!

Interface. 3.5/5

Chiitrans is pretty Iconific. It’s a really old type of designing interfaces, I wonder if they could improve that. The interface is pretty simple, and the presentation of the translation is prettier than TA.

Usage 4/5

The only thing that’s hard about chiitrans is that, there is no user manual for it. (I might as well post up a basic tutorial soon.) I MADE A TUTORIAL! But the interface is really easy for basic usage, the setup and customization needs work though, like adding jdict, mecab and etc —-and mind you there is no user manual for it. Right now I’m stuck on howto activate Mecab for Chiitrans.

The latest version of Chiitrans is bundled with AGTH, but you can use IGTH as well. Just turn on the monitor clip-board icon if you want to do so.

Here’s a nifty feature. The transparent overlay. Now you don’t have to download DevOSD for that. 

Other features taken from their wiki:

• Supported online translation services:
  • Google Translate
  • OCN
  • Babylon
  • SysTran
  • Excite
• Japanese text transliteration support (romaji) via Google Translate.
• Using WWWJDIC and EDICT to separate and translate individual words.
• Optional Atlas support. Available if installation of Atlas is detected. Versions V13 and V14 are supported.
• Optional MeCab support.
• Ability to display furigana (word readings) as hiragana or romaji.
• Can translate to English, Russian and other languages.
• Automatic text formatting before translation:
• Smart remove of duplicate characters (number of characters is detected automatically, executed only if all characters are duplicating).
  • Smart extraction of repeating phrases.
  • User-defined replacement words list with regular expressions syntax support.
  • AGTH: direct text capturing (clipboard is not used). Can monitor multiple contexts.
• Caching of translation results.
• Option to enable semi-transparent background (transparent mode) and switch to fullscreen mode for comfortable play.

Bugs and Limitations

So I tried harder to extract text games like Garnet Cradle and this is the ending result.

Yup, it didn’t end too well. Since Garnet cradle needs some AGTH parameters, and Chiitrans only supports hook codes.

Here’s a bug for the user dictionary, and the fullscreen mode has errors too.

Should I recommend it?

Since newer Otome Visual Novel games dont even need /h codes anymore, you can definitely take this program for a spin. Who knows? , maybe you’ll prefer this over TA.

I’m still hopeful for stable releases and more improvements.