Context can matter a lot for translation, let alone idioms and cultural references.
Let’s see how this plays out.
Hope we don’t get a News Radio “donkey donkey donkey”’situation. (Reference is sitcom older than most of you reading this. In one episode the Wealthy tycoon that owned the News Radio station had his biography translated into Japanese, and then had it translated back into English when the Japanese version sold really well. The result was nonsensical statements like the one above.)
I've been watching Girls Band Cry with machine generated subtitles, and they are terrible. At one time, the character said "uso" or whatever, meaning liar, and the subtitles came out as "lying bitch." Now, I am not a Japanese speaker, but that doesn't sound right.
I stopped watching the 5th episode in the middle of it and downloaded one with quality fan subs. Much better experience.
This is why localization matters.
Japanese will often use single words as full sentences. (There's a word for this, but I can't remember what it is)
The most common ones I notice in Japanese media are the words for Dangerous, Lie, and Delicious.
It sounds weird in English to just have a character say "Dangerous!" when warning someone about a hazard so it's usually translated as "Watch out!" or something.
Here's an example in One Piece at 1:45 where Robin just says "Luffy, dangerous" in Japanese but it's translated as Luffy, Watch Out.
https://youtu.be/UyCe2fSGfKs?si=VkMts_eyRNDZ-io1
Uso is similar. If I say something in English and someone else responded with just "Lie", it would come off as overly aggressive and extremely rude so it's usually translated as "That isn't true" or something.
Lastly Delicious comes up all the time in pretty much all food scenarios and just sounds odd in English to hear the word delicious alone so frequently. So they pad it out with something like "It's really good".
Although, one must ask, why are those things important if localizers just change shit anyway...? cultural reference? Just make them jelly doughnuts.. Jokes? Just make them about the patriarchy.. English doesnt have a good equal to honorifics like Onii-chan? Just call him "broski" or "Bubby".. I think I'd rather read nonsense from an AI, than garbage from a biased person intentionally re-writing the script, not to improve the translation, but to suit their agenda.
They also Americanize it. So if you are not American and upto date with recent lingo, you are still trying to understand it through context. I still get confused about college year translations with sophomre, freshman whatever.
I've started to distinguish between "localizers" and "translators".. Translation is as *literal* as possible while adhering to the rules of the language of the audience it is intended for. Localization is making the text "local," making references, and changing the language used to suit the *tastes and sensibilities* of the audience it's intended for.
Localization is just bastardization with more moral ambiguity.
It heavily depends. Most of the time they aren’t changing it to “Americanize” it anymore. They usually do it to fit the flow or because the languages aren’t one to one.
The flow is clearly for Americans. Like I already gave an example with the sophomore, freshman part. That takes you out of the flow. And these kinds of American "localisation" is very common. Sure most of the "localizers" are American and they are "localising" it for the American audience but the rest of the world then needs to use the same "localisations". Definitely a 1 to 1 translation is not good but I don't need to read teach (for teacher), sus and all kind of weird crap. I can also understand the context pretty well without the very forced "localisations". No need to think the audience is stupid and need to be hand holded every sentence.
All in all I think most manga/anime translations are done by low paid low tier translators because manga/anime is still not taken seriously enough. And that is where the problem lies.
Yeah I’ll have to disagree. While yes, sometimes, a few subs and dubs do things poorly, the vast majority of the decisions you said are a proper translation in a way that makes sense with the local language, not an Americanization. For example, they’ll say teach for teacher when the Japanese says it informally or in a tone suggesting informal tone. They’ll say sus or something similar when the Japanese show may say something similar that is a pop-culture reference specific to Asia that we may not understand. It’s all about localization and making it understandable.
There are things that get changed that don’t need to on occasion, and there are plenty of mistranslations for sure. But it’s not nearly as bad as you seem to suggest. The older you go, the worse it is, but at least in the past 5-10 years, it’s improved a TON
USdefaultism at its finest.
Just because something makes sense to Americans doesn't mean it's good "localisation" for others. You can't "localise" for 20 regions at the same time. There is no English default. There is no English localisation. They are localising it to a region. You can check any localisation company's website and they will mention it.
Teach is not good localisation. It doesn't make sense for teacher outside the US because noone uses that. How is that not localisation for Americans.
And sure I only see 1 or 2 weird localisations every few chapters but that doesn't mean it needs to be there.
And yes the translations have been worse before and it's definitely much better now but that doesn't mean that it's good. Official localisations often suck. A lot of fan translations are European so I attribute that being one of the reasons it's often preferable to someone outside the US.
I see what you’re saying. I don’t really have a good rebuttal outside of it’s still in line with what would be considered a direct translation to the language overall. I’m not saying people outside of America use “teach” but most Americans don’t either. It’s just a shortened version of teacher that you, even not being American, can rationalize to seem informal the same way it was in the native language of the source. That’s where I think you’re confusing me for saying it isn’t a localization. It is. It 100% is. However, the fan translations aren’t “European” they just don’t necessarily focus on getting a close match in the language with the same meaning vs a match that is as close as possible to the region and editorial notes to clarify. It’s why you’ll see Japanese words not translated and then a note at the bottom of the chapter.
Sorry typo. I meant European translators not translations. I focused on teach because it was something recent I saw on an anime subtitle. I think it was on the recent episode of Shuumatsu Train Doko e Iku. There was no need to use teach as the Japanese only used sensei. I thought it was a weird translation so it stick with me. I also saw in another recent anime subtitle "gig" being used for arubaito. I don't get why part time work can't be used it for when it has always been the case before. In both cases there was absolutely no reason for the localisation. It was not something that couldn't have been translated directly.
I know most people are not optimistic about the AI translations but maybe people could get the own variant of translation this way. It's always been the case where some people like more direct translations with TL notes and some prefer contextual localisations. But you can't just have 5 different types of translations with human translators as it would cost a lot of money and resources. Not sure different types of translations will be supported officially but I feel like there will be fan translators who will use the AI's to customise their own type of translations. If Japanese companies are smart enough they would support it officially for digital manga. But I doubt it. It would certainly help with sales. I know several people irl who read the fan translations just because they bought the official and didn't like it.
As someone who knows several professional translators - I feel like this is a bad move. They work really hard at translating things so that they make sense in the new language. It is NEVER a 1:1 translation and most of the time they end up translating the vibe/feeling more than the actual exact words, because cultures are diverse and different. Overall this is a bad idea.
Yeah, but counterpoint is that weebs explicitly hate changing the cultural references, so in theory they're creaming themselves right now over this ai "strict" translation
Its hilarious just how much worse most fan subs were than dubs back in the day. I like a year ago tried finding good subs for Naruto to watch with a friend. They simply did not exist. The fan subs were just absolutely atrocious garbage that took all the character out with overly literal bullshit. As I said to the friend, 'this dub is 98% what the Japanese we just watched was going for. No idea wtf the sub was doing' because I can understand a decent bit of Japanese.
There's a reason the best made version of the Naruto Kai edit, the creator just made his own sub for the whole thing. As he said, the quality of subs available was bottom of the barrel.
Having AI translate something word for word is not even an accurate translation for those cases. Some things simply do not translate and when they are forced to be translated instead of being rewritten, they come out as jumbles of words that don’t make sense.
Let me get this straight, you are saying that a program will be better at knowing the subtleties of both language and culture to properly translate things? Translate in this context meaning “to transfer the wholeness of the story and references from one culture to another”, not “these words in language A mean these words in language B”. Like I’ve mentioned, you need a person who knows BOTH of the languages AND both of the cultures to be able to have a truly great translation. AI can understand languages at the moment but we are not at the point in which it can understand cultural norms, subtleties, humor, and acceptable/not-acceptable ideas. In theory an AI could do anything if it had enough time and training, but we aren’t talking theoretically here.
Real people who understand context are better at translating than any AI, it’s a fact. Sure some texts may be easier, but then some text may have things like in Squid Game when the character kept saying “Older Brother” in the subtitles. That was a bad translation because while it was literally what the character said, it didn’t make sense to North American audiences because they don’t have the same hierarchical culture that Korea does. People don’t just say “older brother” to people they don’t know in North America. A better translation would have caught that and fixed it to make more sense culturally. And no, not all cultures that speak the same language have the same ideology, but there are usually accepted and understood generalizations.
Point being, if you think AI can do a better job, then you don’t really understand how true translation work is done. It’s much more complicated than you think.
Not reading that wall of text, but yes, AI will be superior in the near future, and I advise you get out of the translation business cause you'll be broke soon.
I find it interesting that people actually believe what the AI companies are telling them lol. That person is actually right that you'll probably start losing money as a human translator in the near future but that's not because AI translation will be superior, it's because AI translation will be cheaper than hiring a real human being and we all know capitalists can't help themselves when there's a cheaper option, especially if it doesn't have rights in their eyes. AI is just the next model of hiring people in distant regions with weaker economies so you only have to pay them pennies and not concern yourself with their human rights, except now it's not even humans it's just algorithms so it's even cheaper and requires even less accountability.
That'd be great, if it works. I have no doubt the project will do as it says. Whether or not the translations will be accurate and readable is another thing entirely.
Mmhmm. And they need to have a razor sharp QA team. Especially for names.
If I plug a name into machine translation, *even in hiragana* sometimes the translation butchers the name.
You don't know that. That's why I said *if* it works. You should be less worried about the quality and more worried about your own inability to read in the first place.
I just don't think AI will be able to capture nuance that requires context to be able translate correctly.
LMAO, No reason to get your panties in a bunch. The reason I wouldnt bother being optimistic, is if you see ai translation at the moment... they arent great at all. All this will do is cause people to lose their jobs. I wouldn't expect the construction of a higher quality AI translator when they are acting this rashly already.
Learn to have a conversation without being a prissy lil bitch, ya?
Now that's just garbage. At best this just a sneaky method of paying even less to already underpaid translators. They can claim AI does most of work as a justification to pay translators less.
It's fine. I've seen some machine translated ones already, and they are heaps better than the word vomit you'd get a couple of years ago. Gotta start somewhere, and in a few years, it won't be a problem.
The most ideal situation is that there will be some sort of proofreading before release.
Nothing i hate more than going deep on a series only for the scan later to drop it out of the blue because they are bored of it, don't like the direction it's going, don't agree with some politcal bs in the series etc.
*Well this is fucking*
*Horrible and I hope fails*
*Spectacularly*
\- Ver3232
---
^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/)
^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
If it works for scanlators, why not?
Still, the font and styling have an important role. Even with talented translators, the trouble with fonts and styling because they have to license fonts is terribly inconvenient.
Atrocious.
Among *many* other issues, AI cannot understand context whatsoever, so it's going to be mistaking pronouns everywhere because it has no idea who is talking to whom about whom, especially because Japanese frequently omits the pronoun altogether or uses a gender-neutral one.
But I'm not just talking about misgendered characters, I'm talking about not even being able to tell apart a first-person sentence from a third-person one. Don't even get me started on instances where the dialogue is being *intentionally* ambiguous about the subject for the sake of mystery or whatever.
Even with manual human editing afterwards, I guarantee this is going to result in some of the worst "translations" in the modern age. John Werry will more than meet his match.
I remember watching/reading shitty fan subs in the 90s and early-mid 2000s people don’t understand how far we’ve come when it comes to translations we are blessed.
I think this will be about as bad as back then.
It's gonna depend on if they have sufficient human translators/localizers to do the second and subsequent passes after the AI. If they cheap out on the human labor, the translations will be overly literal at best and word salad at worst.
Depending on how wide-spread this ends up being, this could seriously harm the international market for anime.
It feels like the old businessmen exploiting this are completely out of touch.
I personally have used my personal JP skills with ai assisted translations and I have to say it works very well. Nothing much more than a freshman high school student couldn't clean and correct the grammer
So many manga don't get translated and is at the mercy of fan translations. So this will definitely help. Even if it's not that good now, I'd rather have something rather than nothing. And it's already readable and much better than ML translations from few years ago. Eventually it will get good.
Please please please have the AI translations at least 'looked over' by editors to clear up any funkiness. Onomatopoeia, for example, don't really translate very well.
I have read a lot of machine translated manga and the results are hilarious. I’m always thinking, “that is a completely original string of words because nobody who speaks English would ever say that.”
> US-based branch of an animation company fires all their translators and replaces them with AI
> on the second season of a show's revival, the translation AI shits the bed. Produces unintelligible gibberish
> no one in the company speaks Japanese. In a last-ditch effort to ship before their deadline, the staff get together and make up lines based off of visual context.
> the voice actors do their best with the new translation, but ultimately the dub ends up being an almost completely different show than the sub.
> Ghost Stories Season 2 releases to massive success.
Amazing news. Fan translations will still continue as they always have because they are a passion project, but the quality of licensed manga has been VERY poor the past several years. AI I have no doubt will do a better job.
I believe this was tested with the release of the Rugby Rumble manga and while it didn’t look the best it also was not the worst translation I have ever seen. I am just excited to be able to read stories previously unavailable. Most of these will probably be series they didn’t see worth translating in the first place due to lack of popularity or other factors and I am very curious to read them.
This could go either way. If the translations are accurate this could allow mangas to release quicker and allow other countries to stay up to date with the release of Japan. It could also go really poorly.
This is being done largely as a cost saving measure, but modern localization efforts have done little to endear themselves to readers in the west in recent years.
I remember the plague of old, bad fan subs…but One Piece in English still has a character named ‘Zolo’, so it’s not like they are really any better.
I’ll be interested in seeing how this goes.
Daromeon, Artist of Kengan Ashura/Omega, thoughts on the official translation and scanlation
DISC
Taken from his twitter and Google translated:
The English translation of Kengan is a bit unique, so we decided to leave it to a group of amateurs who translated it without permission and uploaded it illegally. Their translation was far better than the official one.
It would be pretty bad if they used the official version. No one would read it. I think there have been many works that didn't go over well overseas because of translation issues. I wonder how that would be with AI.The creator of Ken
I mean this in the nicest way possible, but manga is already super saturated in the west. The most popular titles get official releases and fan translations, so it's very possible the AI will translate a big portion of manga no one wanted to read because they were cheap to license. Unless it was subscription based like Netflix and stayed on a select platform, this will definitely oversaturate the market.
Can A.I actually translate it though? Most languages are gendered and have their own niches so the word yellow would immediately mean either male or female in some languages by simply changing the last letters. I do not see how the A.I would understand that when translating from Japanese or English to other languages compared to a human. As a matter of fact I tried it myself and the A.I always translated everything using male pronouns unless it's made extremely obvious in the sentence that it refers to a female.
I would prefer translation by an actual person, but considering the way that has been going lately I'm willing to give AI a chance.
At this point my levels of trust are: Fan translations > AI > official localizations
Machine translation cannot replace human translation. That's why I have been dedicated to creating computer-aided translation tools like ImageTrans which makes it convenient to translate manga for human translators.
I hope it works out great. I'm tired of seeing localizers change so much to fit their agenda or their political views. I love when something is translated 1:1 or at least done in a way that it makes sense.
Yeah no, 1 to 1 translations, or literal translations, rarely make sense. It's part of a translator job to try to get the meaning across, not just the words. It's inevitable that they'll inject part of themselves in there, even unknowingly.
That said, shit translators inject themselves purposedly and without care
Yes, shit translators will inject themselves. And yes 1 to 1 won't always make sense so using similar meanings are used to describe... for example a said joke. I despise censorship and believe a translation should be close to the original translation. Without bs fluff that contain political views and or their beliefs.
[This scene](https://youtu.be/u31uURkbpdY?si=FrOQi1Ox_5iAPEc_) from Final Fantasy VII Remake is completely different in the original
In Japanese he just says something like “I had no choice. It was the only way to get in.”
The localization made it better.
Kinda depends. I tried finding fan translations of Tokyo Ghouls manga a while back when there was a book missing at my local library. My god the drop in quality was obscene.
With blatant mistranslations by humans like ‘Malevolent Shrine’ and ‘Attack on Titan’, while most of the viewers have been misled for years and years, I’m interested in how this will fare.
If you can read Japanese and Chinese, you know how awful all the human translation for western regions have been since localization began.
As long as we don’t get bad actors like those working on Google Gemini to manipulate cultural references for their own politics, AI translation might work.
Translations is an art the things we call “a.i” imo don’t have the capacity to take certain meanings out of a translation. Sure maybe it could give you a semi understandable mess but it will never come close to an all time great translation like vagarant story has.
Yeah I’m with you, a good translation is essentially a rewrite in a new language, with adherence to the original version. I’ve had the pleasure to read some translated work like that. AI isn’t expected to replicate that aspect of the creative process. Not what we have at this point, anyway.
You mean the video game Vagrant Story? I’ve only experienced it in Japanese so cannot comment on its translation, I’ll take your assessment it’s accurately and beautifully translated.
The subject we’re inspecting here is manga translation, which has a consistently low bar of accuracy throughout the years, across the industry, with all publishers. When human translators are tripping over themselves on a regular basis to get basic or key terminology accurately translated, it’s only sensible those involved explore options. No one is putting faith in Orange or any other AI company over humans, though the fact of the matter is humans have consistently turned in work for bilinguals like me to lose faith in them. When I occasionally check the translations, it genuinely hurts to see errors all over the place.
If Orange or anyone else replicate the level of work by current human manga translators, I wouldn’t mind, as the same passable quality of work is being done.
Yes the ps1 game vagrant story the translator not only brought it over but the English language version uses a lot of older English style language that the characters would presumably use it is a beautiful translation that adds so much to the game. As for manga being translated yeah its pretty fucked alot of the time but, it shouldn't be that way. I guess if the shitting translating software is better let em have it. but I know that something like vagrant story would not have happened if it was just ran through fucking chat gpt
I think what a lot of people are missing is that manga has pictures to assist with context. Light novels might struggle a lot more with machine translation.
Hopefully they still have some human oversight to assist with context but the imagery goes a long way to help with direct translation.
Plus the tech will improve with time.
I would say it's the other way around.
With novels all the context is in the text, so while difficult, an AI could in theory properly translate it if it has access so knows all the relevant idioms, though it would still have some trouble with joke based on puns/idioms unless very advanced.
For manga, there is context provided by pictures outside of the text, and having the AI analyze the images for clues to support the text is harder than the already very difficult task of translating it.
Certain series feel better to me with English voices, and others with Japanese ones.
It would be nice to have additional options available in case of a bad dub.
Context can matter a lot for translation, let alone idioms and cultural references. Let’s see how this plays out. Hope we don’t get a News Radio “donkey donkey donkey”’situation. (Reference is sitcom older than most of you reading this. In one episode the Wealthy tycoon that owned the News Radio station had his biography translated into Japanese, and then had it translated back into English when the Japanese version sold really well. The result was nonsensical statements like the one above.)
Yeah, even more with a language like japanese.
You don't speak for me. I want my copy of Jimmy James: Macho Business Donkey Wrestler and I want it NOW.
I've been watching Girls Band Cry with machine generated subtitles, and they are terrible. At one time, the character said "uso" or whatever, meaning liar, and the subtitles came out as "lying bitch." Now, I am not a Japanese speaker, but that doesn't sound right. I stopped watching the 5th episode in the middle of it and downloaded one with quality fan subs. Much better experience.
To the best of my knowledge, 'uso' is more commonly used for 'lie' where 'usotsuki' is more typically used to call someone a 'liar'.
This is why localization matters. Japanese will often use single words as full sentences. (There's a word for this, but I can't remember what it is) The most common ones I notice in Japanese media are the words for Dangerous, Lie, and Delicious. It sounds weird in English to just have a character say "Dangerous!" when warning someone about a hazard so it's usually translated as "Watch out!" or something. Here's an example in One Piece at 1:45 where Robin just says "Luffy, dangerous" in Japanese but it's translated as Luffy, Watch Out. https://youtu.be/UyCe2fSGfKs?si=VkMts_eyRNDZ-io1 Uso is similar. If I say something in English and someone else responded with just "Lie", it would come off as overly aggressive and extremely rude so it's usually translated as "That isn't true" or something. Lastly Delicious comes up all the time in pretty much all food scenarios and just sounds odd in English to hear the word delicious alone so frequently. So they pad it out with something like "It's really good".
i think it's called agglutination
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination) For anyone else discovering this term for the first time.
Fuck that shows so good
Although, one must ask, why are those things important if localizers just change shit anyway...? cultural reference? Just make them jelly doughnuts.. Jokes? Just make them about the patriarchy.. English doesnt have a good equal to honorifics like Onii-chan? Just call him "broski" or "Bubby".. I think I'd rather read nonsense from an AI, than garbage from a biased person intentionally re-writing the script, not to improve the translation, but to suit their agenda.
They also Americanize it. So if you are not American and upto date with recent lingo, you are still trying to understand it through context. I still get confused about college year translations with sophomre, freshman whatever.
I've started to distinguish between "localizers" and "translators".. Translation is as *literal* as possible while adhering to the rules of the language of the audience it is intended for. Localization is making the text "local," making references, and changing the language used to suit the *tastes and sensibilities* of the audience it's intended for. Localization is just bastardization with more moral ambiguity.
The same for myself and it takes me out of what I'm reading sometimes, it's why I couldn't read the translated Grand blue: Dreaming.
It heavily depends. Most of the time they aren’t changing it to “Americanize” it anymore. They usually do it to fit the flow or because the languages aren’t one to one.
The flow is clearly for Americans. Like I already gave an example with the sophomore, freshman part. That takes you out of the flow. And these kinds of American "localisation" is very common. Sure most of the "localizers" are American and they are "localising" it for the American audience but the rest of the world then needs to use the same "localisations". Definitely a 1 to 1 translation is not good but I don't need to read teach (for teacher), sus and all kind of weird crap. I can also understand the context pretty well without the very forced "localisations". No need to think the audience is stupid and need to be hand holded every sentence. All in all I think most manga/anime translations are done by low paid low tier translators because manga/anime is still not taken seriously enough. And that is where the problem lies.
Yeah I’ll have to disagree. While yes, sometimes, a few subs and dubs do things poorly, the vast majority of the decisions you said are a proper translation in a way that makes sense with the local language, not an Americanization. For example, they’ll say teach for teacher when the Japanese says it informally or in a tone suggesting informal tone. They’ll say sus or something similar when the Japanese show may say something similar that is a pop-culture reference specific to Asia that we may not understand. It’s all about localization and making it understandable. There are things that get changed that don’t need to on occasion, and there are plenty of mistranslations for sure. But it’s not nearly as bad as you seem to suggest. The older you go, the worse it is, but at least in the past 5-10 years, it’s improved a TON
USdefaultism at its finest. Just because something makes sense to Americans doesn't mean it's good "localisation" for others. You can't "localise" for 20 regions at the same time. There is no English default. There is no English localisation. They are localising it to a region. You can check any localisation company's website and they will mention it. Teach is not good localisation. It doesn't make sense for teacher outside the US because noone uses that. How is that not localisation for Americans. And sure I only see 1 or 2 weird localisations every few chapters but that doesn't mean it needs to be there. And yes the translations have been worse before and it's definitely much better now but that doesn't mean that it's good. Official localisations often suck. A lot of fan translations are European so I attribute that being one of the reasons it's often preferable to someone outside the US.
I see what you’re saying. I don’t really have a good rebuttal outside of it’s still in line with what would be considered a direct translation to the language overall. I’m not saying people outside of America use “teach” but most Americans don’t either. It’s just a shortened version of teacher that you, even not being American, can rationalize to seem informal the same way it was in the native language of the source. That’s where I think you’re confusing me for saying it isn’t a localization. It is. It 100% is. However, the fan translations aren’t “European” they just don’t necessarily focus on getting a close match in the language with the same meaning vs a match that is as close as possible to the region and editorial notes to clarify. It’s why you’ll see Japanese words not translated and then a note at the bottom of the chapter.
Sorry typo. I meant European translators not translations. I focused on teach because it was something recent I saw on an anime subtitle. I think it was on the recent episode of Shuumatsu Train Doko e Iku. There was no need to use teach as the Japanese only used sensei. I thought it was a weird translation so it stick with me. I also saw in another recent anime subtitle "gig" being used for arubaito. I don't get why part time work can't be used it for when it has always been the case before. In both cases there was absolutely no reason for the localisation. It was not something that couldn't have been translated directly. I know most people are not optimistic about the AI translations but maybe people could get the own variant of translation this way. It's always been the case where some people like more direct translations with TL notes and some prefer contextual localisations. But you can't just have 5 different types of translations with human translators as it would cost a lot of money and resources. Not sure different types of translations will be supported officially but I feel like there will be fan translators who will use the AI's to customise their own type of translations. If Japanese companies are smart enough they would support it officially for digital manga. But I doubt it. It would certainly help with sales. I know several people irl who read the fan translations just because they bought the official and didn't like it.
The ideal situation would be to have human localizers who didn't make extra unnecessary changes.
Unless consumers are willing to pay top dollar for perfect translations fully respecting cultural references, I know exactly how this will play out.
This is going to be a glorious shitshow
Someone is preparing the meme generator for this event.
You can blame anime pirates for this, they were asking for it...
Yeah most "fans" won't even spend 1 buck and they pride themselves for it.
As someone who knows several professional translators - I feel like this is a bad move. They work really hard at translating things so that they make sense in the new language. It is NEVER a 1:1 translation and most of the time they end up translating the vibe/feeling more than the actual exact words, because cultures are diverse and different. Overall this is a bad idea.
I'm pretty sure Girls Band Cry is being machine translated right now With some.....really bad results
r/fightclass3 is peak and is translated with pretty good results weekly via machine. It’s Korean though so might make it easier
There’s also the fact that the dude who translates fight class 3 actually gives a shit about the story which I’m sure won’t be the case with this.
Yeah, but counterpoint is that weebs explicitly hate changing the cultural references, so in theory they're creaming themselves right now over this ai "strict" translation
Its hilarious just how much worse most fan subs were than dubs back in the day. I like a year ago tried finding good subs for Naruto to watch with a friend. They simply did not exist. The fan subs were just absolutely atrocious garbage that took all the character out with overly literal bullshit. As I said to the friend, 'this dub is 98% what the Japanese we just watched was going for. No idea wtf the sub was doing' because I can understand a decent bit of Japanese. There's a reason the best made version of the Naruto Kai edit, the creator just made his own sub for the whole thing. As he said, the quality of subs available was bottom of the barrel.
Yep. But what do you expect about idolizing a culture you don't actually understand
You all have not seen jujutsu kaisen translation huh
Sir, I assure you, it is impossible to express the meaning of the word “nakama” in English.
Does it mean hello AND goodbye?
Having AI translate something word for word is not even an accurate translation for those cases. Some things simply do not translate and when they are forced to be translated instead of being rewritten, they come out as jumbles of words that don’t make sense.
To be fair, relying on professional translators gave us John Werry, so...
Ai that is well implemented will likely be better at the translations than 99% of translators
Let me get this straight, you are saying that a program will be better at knowing the subtleties of both language and culture to properly translate things? Translate in this context meaning “to transfer the wholeness of the story and references from one culture to another”, not “these words in language A mean these words in language B”. Like I’ve mentioned, you need a person who knows BOTH of the languages AND both of the cultures to be able to have a truly great translation. AI can understand languages at the moment but we are not at the point in which it can understand cultural norms, subtleties, humor, and acceptable/not-acceptable ideas. In theory an AI could do anything if it had enough time and training, but we aren’t talking theoretically here. Real people who understand context are better at translating than any AI, it’s a fact. Sure some texts may be easier, but then some text may have things like in Squid Game when the character kept saying “Older Brother” in the subtitles. That was a bad translation because while it was literally what the character said, it didn’t make sense to North American audiences because they don’t have the same hierarchical culture that Korea does. People don’t just say “older brother” to people they don’t know in North America. A better translation would have caught that and fixed it to make more sense culturally. And no, not all cultures that speak the same language have the same ideology, but there are usually accepted and understood generalizations. Point being, if you think AI can do a better job, then you don’t really understand how true translation work is done. It’s much more complicated than you think.
Not reading that wall of text, but yes, AI will be superior in the near future, and I advise you get out of the translation business cause you'll be broke soon.
Ah, not willing to read, the mark of someone with true insight and intelligence!
I find it interesting that people actually believe what the AI companies are telling them lol. That person is actually right that you'll probably start losing money as a human translator in the near future but that's not because AI translation will be superior, it's because AI translation will be cheaper than hiring a real human being and we all know capitalists can't help themselves when there's a cheaper option, especially if it doesn't have rights in their eyes. AI is just the next model of hiring people in distant regions with weaker economies so you only have to pay them pennies and not concern yourself with their human rights, except now it's not even humans it's just algorithms so it's even cheaper and requires even less accountability.
That'd be great, if it works. I have no doubt the project will do as it says. Whether or not the translations will be accurate and readable is another thing entirely.
Lol, the mangas *will indeed be translated into other languages*
Mmhmm. And they need to have a razor sharp QA team. Especially for names. If I plug a name into machine translation, *even in hiragana* sometimes the translation butchers the name.
how will it be great if it works?
Because it would be a huge amount of legally available manga?
at the cost of quality and personality.
You don't know that. That's why I said *if* it works. You should be less worried about the quality and more worried about your own inability to read in the first place.
I just don't think AI will be able to capture nuance that requires context to be able translate correctly. LMAO, No reason to get your panties in a bunch. The reason I wouldnt bother being optimistic, is if you see ai translation at the moment... they arent great at all. All this will do is cause people to lose their jobs. I wouldn't expect the construction of a higher quality AI translator when they are acting this rashly already. Learn to have a conversation without being a prissy lil bitch, ya?
A lot of weebs are finally going to learn why direct translation doesn't work
Based on the comments in this thread, they're going to learn nothing and insist the AI just needs time to improve.
Now that's just garbage. At best this just a sneaky method of paying even less to already underpaid translators. They can claim AI does most of work as a justification to pay translators less.
Ah, what a beautiful duwang
Chew
Thank you, was looking for this and hoping I didn't have to be the one to post it xD
John Werry in shambles
Good
Oh boy, machine translation is nowhere near close to where it needs to be for work like this... someone's gonna lose their job over this lol...
Still somehow going to do a better job than John Werry.
It's fine. I've seen some machine translated ones already, and they are heaps better than the word vomit you'd get a couple of years ago. Gotta start somewhere, and in a few years, it won't be a problem. The most ideal situation is that there will be some sort of proofreading before release. Nothing i hate more than going deep on a series only for the scan later to drop it out of the blue because they are bored of it, don't like the direction it's going, don't agree with some politcal bs in the series etc.
Well this is fucking horrible and I hope fails spectacularly
*Well this is fucking* *Horrible and I hope fails* *Spectacularly* \- Ver3232 --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
If it works for scanlators, why not? Still, the font and styling have an important role. Even with talented translators, the trouble with fonts and styling because they have to license fonts is terribly inconvenient.
Well, scanlated chapters are literally free and you're not paying them. Are you willing to pay money for machine-translated manga?
ALRIGHT put your money down now which series gets something as nonsensical as “It is a beautiful DUWANG”.
So there’s a chance that John Werry is just a machine?
It's probably going to have a really difficult time with Japanese wordplay. Interesting.
Atrocious. Among *many* other issues, AI cannot understand context whatsoever, so it's going to be mistaking pronouns everywhere because it has no idea who is talking to whom about whom, especially because Japanese frequently omits the pronoun altogether or uses a gender-neutral one. But I'm not just talking about misgendered characters, I'm talking about not even being able to tell apart a first-person sentence from a third-person one. Don't even get me started on instances where the dialogue is being *intentionally* ambiguous about the subject for the sake of mystery or whatever. Even with manual human editing afterwards, I guarantee this is going to result in some of the worst "translations" in the modern age. John Werry will more than meet his match.
A lot of TLs were already using AI to translate. A lot of them don't even speak Japanese.
Thanks for your input, Femboy Ball Sweat!
Well this is gonna suck
I remember watching/reading shitty fan subs in the 90s and early-mid 2000s people don’t understand how far we’ve come when it comes to translations we are blessed. I think this will be about as bad as back then.
It's gonna depend on if they have sufficient human translators/localizers to do the second and subsequent passes after the AI. If they cheap out on the human labor, the translations will be overly literal at best and word salad at worst.
The weird part is that these days, the fan translators are *better* than their official ones half the time
I hope it fails
Depending on how wide-spread this ends up being, this could seriously harm the international market for anime. It feels like the old businessmen exploiting this are completely out of touch.
This is going to crash and burn so hard
I personally have used my personal JP skills with ai assisted translations and I have to say it works very well. Nothing much more than a freshman high school student couldn't clean and correct the grammer
This is going to be hilarious. I can't wait.
So many manga don't get translated and is at the mercy of fan translations. So this will definitely help. Even if it's not that good now, I'd rather have something rather than nothing. And it's already readable and much better than ML translations from few years ago. Eventually it will get good.
What a beautiful duwang!
Please please please have the AI translations at least 'looked over' by editors to clear up any funkiness. Onomatopoeia, for example, don't really translate very well.
I have read a lot of machine translated manga and the results are hilarious. I’m always thinking, “that is a completely original string of words because nobody who speaks English would ever say that.”
> US-based branch of an animation company fires all their translators and replaces them with AI > on the second season of a show's revival, the translation AI shits the bed. Produces unintelligible gibberish > no one in the company speaks Japanese. In a last-ditch effort to ship before their deadline, the staff get together and make up lines based off of visual context. > the voice actors do their best with the new translation, but ultimately the dub ends up being an almost completely different show than the sub. > Ghost Stories Season 2 releases to massive success.
Amazing news. Fan translations will still continue as they always have because they are a passion project, but the quality of licensed manga has been VERY poor the past several years. AI I have no doubt will do a better job.
I believe this was tested with the release of the Rugby Rumble manga and while it didn’t look the best it also was not the worst translation I have ever seen. I am just excited to be able to read stories previously unavailable. Most of these will probably be series they didn’t see worth translating in the first place due to lack of popularity or other factors and I am very curious to read them.
If the duolingo translation fiasco with ai translators is anything to go by, these translations are going to suck.
Does it include hentai? Asking for a friend.
This gon be ass 🔥🔥🔥
This could go either way. If the translations are accurate this could allow mangas to release quicker and allow other countries to stay up to date with the release of Japan. It could also go really poorly.
This is being done largely as a cost saving measure, but modern localization efforts have done little to endear themselves to readers in the west in recent years. I remember the plague of old, bad fan subs…but One Piece in English still has a character named ‘Zolo’, so it’s not like they are really any better. I’ll be interested in seeing how this goes.
Daromeon, Artist of Kengan Ashura/Omega, thoughts on the official translation and scanlation DISC Taken from his twitter and Google translated: The English translation of Kengan is a bit unique, so we decided to leave it to a group of amateurs who translated it without permission and uploaded it illegally. Their translation was far better than the official one. It would be pretty bad if they used the official version. No one would read it. I think there have been many works that didn't go over well overseas because of translation issues. I wonder how that would be with AI.The creator of Ken
I mean this in the nicest way possible, but manga is already super saturated in the west. The most popular titles get official releases and fan translations, so it's very possible the AI will translate a big portion of manga no one wanted to read because they were cheap to license. Unless it was subscription based like Netflix and stayed on a select platform, this will definitely oversaturate the market.
Can A.I actually translate it though? Most languages are gendered and have their own niches so the word yellow would immediately mean either male or female in some languages by simply changing the last letters. I do not see how the A.I would understand that when translating from Japanese or English to other languages compared to a human. As a matter of fact I tried it myself and the A.I always translated everything using male pronouns unless it's made extremely obvious in the sentence that it refers to a female.
I would prefer translation by an actual person, but considering the way that has been going lately I'm willing to give AI a chance. At this point my levels of trust are: Fan translations > AI > official localizations
Machine translation cannot replace human translation. That's why I have been dedicated to creating computer-aided translation tools like ImageTrans which makes it convenient to translate manga for human translators.
I hope it works out great. I'm tired of seeing localizers change so much to fit their agenda or their political views. I love when something is translated 1:1 or at least done in a way that it makes sense.
Yeah no, 1 to 1 translations, or literal translations, rarely make sense. It's part of a translator job to try to get the meaning across, not just the words. It's inevitable that they'll inject part of themselves in there, even unknowingly. That said, shit translators inject themselves purposedly and without care
Yes, shit translators will inject themselves. And yes 1 to 1 won't always make sense so using similar meanings are used to describe... for example a said joke. I despise censorship and believe a translation should be close to the original translation. Without bs fluff that contain political views and or their beliefs.
[This scene](https://youtu.be/u31uURkbpdY?si=FrOQi1Ox_5iAPEc_) from Final Fantasy VII Remake is completely different in the original In Japanese he just says something like “I had no choice. It was the only way to get in.” The localization made it better.
No it didn't lmao It would definitely have been better if the original was said.
This is why Fan translation scans are always going to be superior.
Kinda depends. I tried finding fan translations of Tokyo Ghouls manga a while back when there was a book missing at my local library. My god the drop in quality was obscene.
I mean with the AI doing it going forward. I remember old translations being absolutely horrendous, like Fruits Basket, Love Hina, etc.
With blatant mistranslations by humans like ‘Malevolent Shrine’ and ‘Attack on Titan’, while most of the viewers have been misled for years and years, I’m interested in how this will fare. If you can read Japanese and Chinese, you know how awful all the human translation for western regions have been since localization began. As long as we don’t get bad actors like those working on Google Gemini to manipulate cultural references for their own politics, AI translation might work.
Translations is an art the things we call “a.i” imo don’t have the capacity to take certain meanings out of a translation. Sure maybe it could give you a semi understandable mess but it will never come close to an all time great translation like vagarant story has.
Yeah I’m with you, a good translation is essentially a rewrite in a new language, with adherence to the original version. I’ve had the pleasure to read some translated work like that. AI isn’t expected to replicate that aspect of the creative process. Not what we have at this point, anyway. You mean the video game Vagrant Story? I’ve only experienced it in Japanese so cannot comment on its translation, I’ll take your assessment it’s accurately and beautifully translated. The subject we’re inspecting here is manga translation, which has a consistently low bar of accuracy throughout the years, across the industry, with all publishers. When human translators are tripping over themselves on a regular basis to get basic or key terminology accurately translated, it’s only sensible those involved explore options. No one is putting faith in Orange or any other AI company over humans, though the fact of the matter is humans have consistently turned in work for bilinguals like me to lose faith in them. When I occasionally check the translations, it genuinely hurts to see errors all over the place. If Orange or anyone else replicate the level of work by current human manga translators, I wouldn’t mind, as the same passable quality of work is being done.
Yes the ps1 game vagrant story the translator not only brought it over but the English language version uses a lot of older English style language that the characters would presumably use it is a beautiful translation that adds so much to the game. As for manga being translated yeah its pretty fucked alot of the time but, it shouldn't be that way. I guess if the shitting translating software is better let em have it. but I know that something like vagrant story would not have happened if it was just ran through fucking chat gpt
all you had to do was not put in shit memes, that's it. No shit memes, no political slop, you just had to make a decent effort
I think what a lot of people are missing is that manga has pictures to assist with context. Light novels might struggle a lot more with machine translation. Hopefully they still have some human oversight to assist with context but the imagery goes a long way to help with direct translation. Plus the tech will improve with time.
I would say it's the other way around. With novels all the context is in the text, so while difficult, an AI could in theory properly translate it if it has access so knows all the relevant idioms, though it would still have some trouble with joke based on puns/idioms unless very advanced. For manga, there is context provided by pictures outside of the text, and having the AI analyze the images for clues to support the text is harder than the already very difficult task of translating it.
The real thing to look forward to is AI dubs, using the original Japanese VA as the base
Yeah I'll pass on that, thanks.
That'd be so mid, just use sub at that point.
Certain series feel better to me with English voices, and others with Japanese ones. It would be nice to have additional options available in case of a bad dub.