Saturn Fan Issue 068 (April 10, 1998) 1.0.0

I enjoy Sega Saturn coverage, especially the dedicated magazines so thank you so much with this. I tend to download nearly all mags based on videogames that I can get my hands on, just in case some disappear forever or get lost, so I will always download any Japanese VG mags you put up. 

This is the only issue of it I had, but the entire run of Saturn Fan was scanned (by a scanner who has since passed away) and is available at The Internet Archive. 

My scan is better, though.

I go there to get some hard-to-find ones, but when this website has them i always quietly replace the other copies. Your 341MB scan easily beats the others out in quality, but I forget when Saturn Fan was originally done. 5 or 10 years can make a difference in scanning tech or availability to some people. I love the Dengeki PS ones you put out. I do need to get a tablet, trying to translate with a phone can be a little tough, like you said before.

The worst ones to try to translate with google lens are Famitsu, though.  Famitsu is made for children, so all of the difficult kanji have furigana (tiny phonetic spellings of the kanji using the kana characters) so that kids can read them.  But Google lens has trouble since the furigana alone don't always make complete words, and even if they did, it would be like having the same word twice on the page.  Mags aimed at older audiences without the furigana give FAR clearer translations.

I wondered why Famitsu were so rough -- I thought I needed to update the firmware or purchase an app add-on or something. That makes sense, thanks for the details. I remember hearing that 20 years ago, but that was before being able to translate things digitally. Good to know.

On the other hand, if you're doing some sort of manual translation (either looking things up in a dictionary or typing the Japanese into a translator), the furigana in Famitsu make things much easier.

Nothing is perfect, language is hard.

It's funny working with kids in Japan when you realize that most of them have an incomplete grasp of all of the writing that surrounds them in daily life.  I asked a kid the other day what was written on a poster in the hallway, and they could only read part of the sentence because they hadn't yet learned some of the kanji used.  In English, kids can come to unfamiliar words and at the very least try to sound them out, even if they're unfamiliar with the meaning.  But a Japanese kid comes across some unfamiliar kanji, and not only will they have no idea what it means, they'll have no idea how it's pronounced, either (unless there is furigana present, of course.)