---
id: two-stage-user-styled-translation/01-summary
title: 'Two-stage styled translation exists only in pieces: 1. Summary'
report: https://ai.hiina.space/reports/two-stage-user-styled-translation.md
section: 1
version: 1
updated: '2026-10-27'
author: Hiina
---

Index of everything on this site: https://ai.hiina.space/index.md

# Two-stage styled translation exists only in pieces: 1. Summary

- Section 1 of 12 of the report "Two-stage styled translation exists only in pieces" by Hiina (v1, updated 2026-10-27)
- Report overview and contents: https://ai.hiina.space/reports/two-stage-user-styled-translation.md
- Next: https://ai.hiina.space/reports/two-stage-user-styled-translation/02-humans-ship-variants-only-where-the-choice.md

## 1. Summary

Every layer of the pipeline has precedent, but this search found no system that assembles them: an offline pass that turns Japanese game or VN text into a stored, language-neutral record of meaning, context and voice, plus a separate cheap renderer that turns that record and a user style profile into the displayed line. The nearest real systems each own one layer. **Fan teams already ship static variants**: the Committee of Zero Steam patch for Steins;Gate 0 added an "Option to include Japanese honorifics in text" ([Committee of Zero project page](http://sonome.dareno.me/projects/sg0-steam.html)), and Square Enix shipped two selectable scripts for Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles ([Inverse](https://www.inverse.com/gaming/ivalice-chronicles-final-fantasy-tactics-japanese-only-feature-english-version), secondary). **Localisation formats already branch at display time**: MessageFormat 2 and Fluent select variants on any string variable, so a `$honorifics` selector is legal today, though every example in their documentation branches on grammar, not style ([UTS #35 Part 9](https://unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-messageFormat.html); [Fluent selectors](https://projectfluent.org/fluent/guide/selectors.html)). **Offline context extraction already exists in VN tooling**: GalTransl builds a character dictionary with an LLM pass over the script, keeps a per-line JSON cache, and can rebuild output from that cache without calling a model ([GalTransl README_EN](https://github.com/GalTransl/GalTransl/blob/main/README_EN.md); [GalTranslPP](https://github.com/julixian/GalTranslPP)). **The split between planning and wording is old NLG practice**: a symbolic planner feeding a neural realiser cut omissions from 41 to 6 on WebNLG at equal BLEU ([Moryossef et al. 2019](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.03396)).

What is missing is the joint. Live tools (LunaTranslator, XUnity plugins, VNTranslator, UGTLive) are single-stage translators with a free-text prompt box. Their caches are keyed by source string and store final text. In this search, none documented a structured style setting such as an honorifics toggle, and none stored more than one rendering per line ([Luna docs](https://docs.lunatranslator.org/en/guochandamoxing.html); [XUnity README](https://github.com/bbepis/XUnity.AutoTranslator/blob/master/README.md)). In research, formality control works well in the English-to-Japanese direction, but this search found no study of rendering Japanese honorifics and register into English under a user setting, and none that feeds an LLM-written scene description to a separate weaker renderer.

The evidence supports a specific shape for the design. Put hard, closed-class facts (names, address terms, honorific spans, register) in structured fields, and apply the closed-class toggles in code wherever possible. A rule-based Japanese verb editor kept formality accuracy at 95.5% formal and 100% informal, where a learned seq2seq post-editor collapsed informal accuracy to 26.2% ([Amazon IWSLT 2022](https://aclanthology.org/2022.iwslt-1.32.pdf)). Keep the Japanese source in the renderer's prompt, because every pivot representation tested so far loses meaning. Cache renders by line ID, record version and style hash, and pre-render ahead of the reader. Evaluate with targeted programmatic checks and a cross-family judge, because BLEU and COMET-class metrics either saturate or punish exactly the changes a style setting asks for.

The same record is the natural backbone for a Japanese-learning reading overlay, described in a companion report on Japanese learning and Anki tooling. A record that already holds lemma IDs, a literal gloss, register notes and a neutral translation turns rungs 4 and 5 of that overlay's hint ladder into a lookup plus a short render, and makes its clause-level hybrid mode tractable. The cheapest useful first step is an afternoon-sized benchmark on about 300 lines of a VN script the experimenter owns: frontier-made records rendered by a local 8B or 14B model under five style profiles, measured against direct frontier translation for fidelity, style compliance and per-line latency on a single 24 GB consumer GPU. That run also answers the overlay design's open latency question.

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Text licensed CC BY 4.0 (attribution: Hiina, ai.hiina.space). Source: https://github.com/hiinaspace/ai-hiina-space