The power of Google Translate (also on papercraft images!)

Some time ago I showed you how to look for papercrafts that have "gone dead" over the years yourself (in this post).

I think it's important to learn that of course because it's gonna happen more and more the older you get and harsh but true, the only one that's going to spend time to help you with that is yourself (that's really not sad 😞 or anything I think, but other people just won't have the time in their lives to help you with things that most people don't care a lot for, and let's be honest: a papercraft that you like really isn't thát interesting to most other people... 😐).

That's why earlier I started doing my "How to 3D extract" series to show you how to do that using free tools too (because I can't spend a lot of time and money myself either and luckily there are already a lot of smart people that do want to help others for whatever reason 😊!) And thanks to the internet you (and I at some point during my papercrafting hobby happily enough 😉) could find them too!)

Long story short for now, I decided that maybe I can help you talk about how I deal with Japanese (or other languages that you don't understand) papercrafts with free tools in case you don't know yet!

1) Google Translate for searching more (https://translate.google.com/)

This helps a lot if (like me) you can't read Japanese (or most of the World's languages fluently to be honest...). On the Google Translate website, you can copy+paste any text in the translate box, set the language the text to translate is in (or if you don't recognize the language, you can ask Google Translate to try and recognize it itself) and then set up our native language as the resulting language!

But what's more, instead of a piece of text, you can also input a website URL and then it gives you a URL that you can click to visit a translation of the website (or you can go the special "Websites" tab for the same thing 😉)! It won't be perfect of course, but usually it's enough to help you understand what you're on the website for so it can help you find papercrafts! 🙂

(you can always see what the site looks
like in the original language)

2) Translate JPG Images (sometimes first converting PDF files to JPG images!)

Since papercraft are usually images, you can't just copy+paste into Google Translate. If they do come with text like instructions, you can use Google Translate Image or Documents tabs to translate the text in them.

Once the translation is done, you can Copy the translated text or Save the whole translated image for your convenience (I think it will be best to build the original PDF file though!)

You might need to convert the PDF parts files to JPG images with a tool like Zamzar (or another free "PDF to JPG conversion" tool that you know) like in this case too (an old super deformed old F-15 fighter plane that somebody asked me about causeding me to tell you about it 😊).

(I actually got curious and found out that it also works for my own instructions after converting the PDF files back to JPG images! The Legend of Zelda Pamela and her dad can attest to that, so maybe I should stop making the instructions into PDF files in the future?)

I hope you found Google Translate as useful as I did and I'll think about that question for my next new papercraft (which you'll find here on my blog and on my own download site: Ninjatoes' papercraft webpage of course 😀)

Have fun and Merry Christmas everybody!🎄