Engineers on their 4th straight week of crunch; No amount of weighting or learning sets are able to make an AI that wont translate Itadakimasu as “Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub”. One team tried making an AI that just reads the finished script, and replaces just that one phrase with a better translation, but for reasons no one can understand, it breaks every time they try and deploy it.
If you even mention the phrase MTL in an anime/manga community the violent reaction you get is enormous.
This person is just demonstrating a complete and total lack of understanding of this audience by thinking literally anyone in these spaces would prefer MTL over literally any human translator no matter who they are.
MTL is a slur to weebs. They hate AI more than actual artists do. Have you seen the incomprehensible bullshit that occurs when you MTL a light novel? It’s all over some sites and people fucking hate it.
Thinking that there’s a single weeb out there who would be pleased about this just demonstrates being so utterly out of touch.
Wow, never knew this. Always just thought MTL was a pretty practical “stop-gap solution” so you can having something readable early and at least understand some of it before someone does a “real translation”. What’s their reasoning?
It’s incomprehensible. You only really get the basics of a story. And you aren’t even sure if what you are reading is accurate/makes sense.
Even the best work of art ends up sounding like trash. I once read something without knowing it was MTL. I thought the story was trash but it was just so poorly translated.
People don’t speak like normal people. Words are badly translated. The MTL also has issues with names, it isn’t sure if a word is a name or not and thus translates names. There’s grammar issues. The MTL also has no context so stuff can be translated in different ways at different times.
I came back to that work when it was licensed and it was decent. Not great but decent. The MTL just made the work so much worse.
Translation is more of an art than science. Some expressions don’t translate. Translators alleviate with notes or by switching the expression with something equivalent in the other language.
Everything the fascists disagree with is “woke” idk how these hogs don’t get tired of this constant complaining 24/7 of this nebulous thing they call “woke”
Weird to see them siding with the AI on this one, I guess they smell the grift and need to get in on it.
They’d cut off their own noses if they thought it’d piss off the wokes
We should definitely loudly proclaim how angry we’d all be if the fash literally cut off their own noses.
bit idea: guy who insists ‘weeb’ is a slur and starts an ensuing 200 comment argument thread
Basement Americans
God I should be that person
I’ve met someone who unironically believed this.
Ah yes just what I wanted, completely incomprehensible subtitles done by AI
They may be incomprehensible, yes, but at least they will be
non-politicaltranslations
non-political translations with slurs!
How can I enjoy “Big Titty Monster Girl Who Looks 12 But Is Actually 5000 Years Old” any other way
What a beautiful Duwang
Wasn’t that translation just some Chinese kid’s project for his English class
It was a South East Asian kid and a bit more convoluted than that, but basically yeah
Duwang is a perfectly legitimate translation of 杜王
I will die on this hill
Actually Mori for 杜 is the 訓読 so the correct translation would be Mori-Wang.
Who the fuck would see this as a good thing?
Oh right, weebs. Of course.
I hope the AI database they use ends up translating every instance of “American” to “hairy cracker.”
god damn this sucks
Insinuating that the translators decide what is going to be said instead of the publisher that buys the localization?
Now I want to see a purely ML-translated Monogatari series attempt…
I could see it getting good enough one day, but I still wouldn’t want to take the human out of localization.
Tbf though the shit some of these weebs watch looks like there weren’t any humans involved in making it already, so maybe they’re approaching the issue a little differently than I am.
There’s no way. I think anything short of a sapient AI would turn monogatari into complete gibberish.
A Turing test for true otaku!
I say let the weebs have their MTL, while I await my sapient AI translator comrades.
Tbh, even monogatari translated properly is basically gibberish without extensive notes about stuff that simply cant be conveyed directly in a translated script
I wish japanese wasn’t such a useless language to know cause there are some things, like monogatari, that I’d really like to be able to read in original form
It deconstructs language as much as everything else. It’s very tricky. Some things will go over the heads of native speakers (although that’s not really uncommon on TV imo).
I wouldn’t say Japanese is useless. A fair amount of research in some fields is published in Japanese, for example. But I readily admit other languages give you better bang for the study hours
I don’t know too much Mandarin, but I think it makes sense for an Anglophone to study Mandarin to proficiency and then pick up enough Japanese for casual use. The characters make up a good portion of the study requirements, and many are inter-recognizable between the two languages. Also, once you’ve wrapped your brain around Mandarin grammar, I think Japanese grammar should be much easier to approach.
If you ever end up trying to learn it, I might be able to give you some pointers. I’ve got a little experience helping others so feel free to reach out.
I don’t know too much Mandarin, but I think it makes sense for an Anglophone to study Mandarin to proficiency and then pick up enough Japanese for casual use. The characters make up a good portion of the study requirements, and many are inter-recognizable between the two languages. Also, once you’ve wrapped your brain around Mandarin grammar, I think Japanese grammar should be much easier to approach.
As someone who speaks both Chinese and Japanese I’m sorry to say that this plan doesn’t make much sense. Chinese and Japanese grammar are structural opposites, with Chinese being much closer to English word order while Japanese is back to front so to speak. Chinese characters are used in Japanese but many of them look different due to simplification and centuries of linguistic drift. The pronunciations are also very different between the two languages so even if you can kind of guess what certain words mean you won’t be able to verbalize them.
To form a crude comparison, what you proposed is like a Japanese or Chinese person talking about how they’ll learn French first and then pick up German easily because they already know the alphabet.
I do feel like if I learned Mandarin I’d much more easily justify learning a “just for fun” language like Japanese, so that’s definitely a thought. I’ve actually been keeping my eye open for Chinese classes I can take in my area but the pickings are pretty slim
As a weeb who speaks Japanese… what the hell is he even talking about?
I guess there was an episode of Ragna Crimson with some blatant bowdlerization in the subtitles, but that was more notable in just how absurdly offensive the original was, out of nowhere and for no appreciable reason at all (correct subtitles would have needed the f-slur, for a start). But that’s the only thing I’ve even noticed?
the big one i remember is how people got so fucking mad when i think i turned my friend into a girl was made trans in the translation despite the fact that anyone who hasn’t had their brain rotted by removed hentai (or who was incredibly closeted and in denial) would read the words on the page and say “oh, this is about a trans girl coming out to her friend and then to the school” because the character in question says they will now live as a girl, dress as one at school and got official permission from the school to do so, are visibly happier and everyone can see it, says they ‘finally feel like the real me’, attends gym class with the girls, etc.
and people were writing essays demanding the translator get fired, talking about how it was actually femboy erasure, how it wasn’t respecting the fictional characters right to decide their own gender, all sorts of bullshit. now it was an incorrect translation, because the mangaka said they weren’t trans, but if you weren’t paying attention to that stuff and instead just read the manga and translated it (like i assume the translator did because that’s what they were paid to do) you would obviously translate it as a trans story
The concern trolling “femboy erasure” shit makes me wanna die. Weebs are gonna be in denial about characters like Brisket (and the general existence of trans ppl in fiction) until the heat death of the universe I swear
yeah, i shared (and added to) a post about this shit the other day. it’s such a prevalent thing i hate it so fucking much
There was an uproar a while back in some anime when “lolicon” got translated as “pedophile”.
It’s only a lolicon when they’re from Japan. Elsewhere, they’re “sparkling pedophiles”.
Elsewhere, they’re “sparkling pedophiles”.
Like Edward from Twilight!
God, zetsubou sensei, the SHAFT masterwork.
I should rewatch
It’s aged well. The social commentary is as relevant as ever.
I’ve heard multiple Japanese people refer to Epstein and Prince Andrew as “Lolicon”. Pretty sure when the news broke a lot of Japanese people were talking about Epstein’s “lolicon Island” as well.
