As is always the case, all publishers need to do is look at the scanlation community to see how things will or will not work, since the scanlators are already doing, for free, what the publishers hope to do for profit. Whatever problems exist and whatever solutions there are to those problems, the scanlators have already discovered.
And if they would only do that, they would discover, for instance, that MTL, presented as a finished product on its own, is so blatantly crappy that it’s essentislly universally derided, with the only split being between the people who might grudgingly tolerate it in a specific case and the people who reject it outright.
There’s no need for the JAT to argue that case when vivid proof that they’re right already exists in virtually every comment section of every machine translated manga.
But instead, the publishers consistently make choices that any halfway decent scanlator could tell them are going to fail to appeal to the fans, which choices then - surprise surprise - fail to appeal to the fans.
Western readers: “We want good translations, and we’ll pay for them by buying volumes.”
Japanese publishers: Use MTL
Western readers: “Yeah, we’re not buying that…”
Japanese publishers: surprisedpikaface.jpg
Well, I doubt their official position would have been “we prefer to be unemployed”.
Sure, but MTL is trash anyway and still requires a human to complete the translation.
I didn’t say they were wrong, just that this would always be the answer
It’s exactly why I didn’t pursue translation even though it’s what I really wanted to do. And that was like 15 years ago, when I first did a little translation work. That translation would be taken over by technology was very clear even back then.
“AI is unfit to translate manga so far.”
Lol, why tf is this downvoted
The AI translation argument wasn’t really about whether nor not it would work, it was people voicing their frustration at Western Localizers making large alterations to apply their own personal culture and politics to a work that did not originally have that.
And honestly, I would prefer grammatically inaccurate machine translations over “localized” translations that deviate significantly from the original.
You’re conflating two entirely different debates.
Yes - there has been some debate around western publishers overly aggressively “localizing” manga and/or changing details to not just make things more understandable to western readers, but deliberately altering social /political content to accord with their own views. The two broad positions in that debate are to continue to depend on western publishers and their translations, or to keep translation in-house - under the supervision of the Japanese publishers.
This debate starts from the position that translation will be kept in-house, and concerns how it will be done - whether by human translators or AI. The publishers want to use AI for one and only one reason - because it would be cheaper. The JAT’s position is that machine translation is so vastly inferior that it will not work, and that human translators must be used.
The AI translation argument wasn’t really about whether nor not it would work, it was people voicing their frustration at Western Localizers making large alterations to apply their own personal culture and politics to a work that did not originally have that.
That was not the argument at all. Japanese publishers want this to be able to increase production overseas. That was the argument. Translators don’t want this because a: it’s their jobs, and b: it’s very inaccurate.
Also, the politics insertion is on such a small scale that it doesn’t warrant full scale AI translation in any way. Many of these cases are due to editors anyway and not the translators so AI would not fix this problem. Localization itself is very much necessary. Japanese is conceptually such a different language system to English.
And honestly, I would prefer grammatically inaccurate machine translations over “localized” translations that deviate significantly from the original.
These ‘grammatically inaccurate machine translations’ often are so bad that they don’t even get the subject of a sentence correct, completely changing the meaning. Or don’t have context and as such, writes something that completely doesn’t relate to what was previously written. Calling it just grammatically inaccurate is downplaying how bad it can be in my opinion. Human QA can remedy some of it so that it’s more readable, but that’s not enough to actually fix bad flow, misinterpreted meaning, missing context etc. Having to go back and fix shit is much more intensive than doing it right in the first place.
