The Xenosaga Episode I -Official Design Materials- book is not the only Xenosaga source book with lore content that is useful when it comes to Xenosaga analysis and referencing. Most fans know about the Xenosaga Episode III Perfect Guide and the slightly less famous Episode III Official Complete Guide as well. But there are more sourcebooks with lore content that is often overlooked, such as the Xenosaga Episode I Official Complete Guide, which I have now made a section for on the study guide along with the Xenosaga Episode I Official Guidebook.
Since I have been unable to acquire a new translator I decided to go with a machine translation for the moment. I know it is not optimal, but machine translations have advanced enough that they are not all that bad anymore. You can at least get the gist of what something is saying, and if I need to quote anything from it in the future I will probably just run those particular sentences with someone who knows Japanese. But I need to get these sections up so that I can progress with other articles that will or may reference parts in these books.
In defense of machine translations though, I will say that most of the older fan translations of Xenogears: Perfect Works and Xenosaga Episode I -Official Design Materials- were not better than current machine translations are, and in several instances, fan translations are actually significantly worse. Whenever the original text of an awkward or weird sentence done by a fan translator is run through a modern machine translation, 9 times out of 10 another translator will tell me the machine translation is actually better. The current Xenogears: Perfect Works scanlation from 2009 is so poor that a modern machine translation would actually have been preferable. Though back then the machine translation possibilities were just coming out and they were very inferior to what they are today, so back then Ichiban Manten and others did not really have a choice but to translate themselves with dictionaries and stuff just to get a general gist of what something was saying.
Back in the day there was also a slight elitism around who could read Japanese or not, with discussions often being shut down if the person making an argument could not read the original Japanese text. Knowing now that many of these fans who claimed to be able to read Japanese well enough did several translation mistakes, I am extremely wary of taking any one translator's word for anything, and if the text or quote is important enough as the basis for a theory or argument, then I will feel more comfortable if I have at least two translations of the same text done by independent translators who are not part of the same group. With machine translations having progressed to at least the quality of the average fan translator, we now have a much more egalitarian approach to Japanese text sources, and I fully intend to run most, if not all, translations also through machines from now on as an additional comparison with both fan translations and official translations when needed.
As an example, I decided to preserve jetfuel's old translation of the first page of the "remaining mysteries" section in the Xenosaga Episode I Official Complete Guide with machine translations provided next to them. I'd like you to read that, compare his translations that he "painstakenly translated" back in 2002, and honestly tell me you prefer them over the machine translations. I do not think most people will.
But do not worry. Machine translations, whenever they appear, will be clearly marked as such. In the lore books sections they will be marked with gray text. Using machine translation, I also finished up what was missing from Part 2 of the Official Design Materials book, mainly the interview with Tsutomu Terada. I do not think these last untranslated bits were worth bothering some translator's time to fully translate, and that is another reason why machine translation should be seen more positively, because there is a lot of text in these types of books and sometimes you just want to get the gist of things and not waste your own or somebody else's time.
