Is fansubbing being done of commented games in Japanese, Chinese, or Korean? I was just looking at the commented game at tom's kifu site http://weiqi.sports.tom.com/php/listqipu.html (the top game -- commented games are marked in red) and wishing I could read it. Actually, I wish I could even see it in cgoban3 -- it's in simplified Chinese, gb2312, and if I edit the sgf with notepad++, I can see the characters, but not in cgoban3 or in the tom site reader. Anyway, I don't know Chinese or Korean.

I would be happy to try to translate Japanese commented games (my Japanese is intermediate N3 level; pretty bad, but good enough for the Nihon Kiin tesuji problem books, for example). Does anyone know of a free source of commented games? Maybe the newspapers? But those comments are spread across many days. Have people tried fansubbing these, like for dramas and manga? The usual fansub rules would apply, one would think: if a commercial translation is done, the fansub version is taken off. Or that's my understanding, haven't done this personally. But I know I would like to see a lot more commented games (like all the LG round of 16, say!). I subscribe to gogameworld.com, and it's nice, but they don't have the resources to translate many games -- never a whole tournament (though I don't know how many games are commented on in the original languages, either, but my guess is quite a few, but maybe only nonfree in published books).

If the potential legal issues can be sorted out, I'd be happy to try to translate Chinese game comments into English.

The encoding at least I can help with: go into the sgf file in notepad++ and add "CA[gb2312]" right after the first semicolon. That tells cgoban what character encoding to use.

Alternatively, here it is converted into UTF8:

Tangentially related; is there any way to prevent the old comments from coming back grayed out when you play through a game? The characters look like little gray blobs.

Oh, that looks so nice! Now I can try to cut and paste the comments into online Chinese dictionaries. But the one I'm using now, http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php, is fine for words but not so good for phrases or sentences, it seems.

Does anyone have a recommendation on which online Chinese dictionary is best?

Well, here's my translation, hopefully a bit simpler and more accurate than online dictionaries :p

Quite a detailed commentary. I love how the commentator knows some 35 moves before the end that white will win by half a point. Kudos to illuck for translating, to emeraldemon for pushing the idea along to eoi for coming up with it in the first place!

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Thanks illuck, that was awsome. I woke up in the middle of the night and watched part of that game, so it's awsome to see the commentary. Pretty sick game, very close. It's funny, for me, the players make impressively awesome moves, to the reviewers the players either proper or making mistakes!

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Thanks illluck, just great! Btw, I had to change the encoding to gb2312 to work on my machine (cgoban3 on windows 7). I thought the whole round was amazing, Lee, Lee, and Li all losing, 2 half-point games.

So this is actually a second translation, from Han Sanghoo 6p in Korean to Chinese to English. It seems to be a broadcast, maybe on Baduk TV?

Yes, this was translated twice, so errors and ambiguities are probably pretty common. There were a couple of places where I didn't really understand the comment, either due to the fact I'm working off a translation or that I'm not strong enough, I tried to be as literal as possible in those cases.

Impressive how many moves he identifies as mistakes. Also impressive how often he is wrong about the next move.

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Occupy Babel!

Thank you illluck.

N8 in comment #40 should read N12 (as move #41).

Indeed, it's due to a different coordinate labelling system on Tygem. I must have mentally corrected it without realizing, thanks for bringing it up