Translations
A data-visualization experiment — hand-translating Asian Kung-Fu Generation lyrics from Japanese, and charting the effort.
Part language-learning, part analysis — I hand-translate the lyrics of my favourite band and chart the effort as I go.
— Google Sheets: primary data source for study times and metadata.
— Spotify API: song names and track lengths.
— Flask (Python), HTML / CSS, JavaScript.
Asian Kung-Fu Generation is a Japanese alt-rock band from Yokohama — and my favourite band. Translating their lyrics is how I practise the language and scratch the itch to measure things. Here’s how a song goes:
- Write the lyrics out by hand, highlight the words I don’t know, and break them apart. Example.
- Run a script to pull out features — track length, unique character count, minutes spent.
- Look for patterns: am I getting faster, and which songs fought back hardest?
Unique character count vs. minutes spent translating. Hover a point for song details.
Raw minutes spent on each translated song.
Efficiency (min/char) over translation order. Downward trend = improving. Hover for song name.
Minutes spent per unique character, per song. Lower is more efficient.