All translators should be replaced with ai

I think it's completely fine to add some more natural sounding phrases instead of being 100% one-to-one terminology.

Because Japanese often has phrases that don't feel very natural if you be very strict about it

sou iwarete mo = even if you say that... (it means I disagree with this)

kirai janai wa = I don't hate it (it means I kinda like it)

sonna mon ka? = is that what this is? (it means like "Is that all you got" depending on context)

and many other that I can't think of at the moment. You shouldn't be too literal.

Translation: Painstakingly precise craft where certain texts are constantly being revised across millennia because people are constantly arguing about tone, cultural context, and author intent.

MAL: Lol, some translator pissed me off so get a computer to do it.

I've seen AI translated song lyrics. They not only do not flow well, but they are also full of inaccuracies and made up passages once you look at the actual text.

Also, I appreciate translator notes in a book with an appendix I can read, but when they show up in real time, it's a sign the translator is bad at their job and writes wooden dialogue.



These conversations are mostly useless and go bad because most people don't actually understand the other language and thus are susceptible to hucksters who claim they alone have the one true translation or judge something by whether it looks or sounds right. If you read the prefaces of iconic historical literature, the translator goes into great detail defending their stylistic choices and pointing out the long arguments people had about certain versions of the text. It's not a job for amateur Dunning-Kruger types on the Internet.

gonna disagree with this, i think it's a legitimate stylistic choice. the funny thing is that i associate things like TNs/footnotes, and translators commentary far more with "serious" translation projects, like translations of literature, rather than pop-culture translation which tends to favor translations which read like natural english.


i think there is a legitimate change in TLs over time, and i think it's due to the prevalence of anime on more mainstream platforms in the last decade-plus. anime TLs historically are a lot different than most pop-culture TL practices, and i think this is because it has an amateur background. the first wave of fansubs were done by enthusiasts who were not in the film industry, and as a result, didn't feel a need to follow film-industry practices of "fluent english" translating. they developed their own standards/practices, and traditions, while nowadays you seem more likely to get someone who translates anime in the same way as someone might translate a french movie into english - by making it sound "english" in syntax and style.

Anyone who actually thinks AI translation would be better is a fucking moron.

There will always be cases where localization is necessary to properly convey the author's intention, because Japanese and English are two very complex, nuanced, and very different languages. AI can not understand any of that nuance or complexity, and it can't tell from context when something should not be translated directly, so with it, you will miss out on important things, including some characters' unique speech quirks.

Besides, the use of slang and "western lingo" (which is a meaningless term that just refers to the English language, which English localization will obviously always include), is not that big of a deal. Outright mistranslations should be the only issue with localization that actually bothers anyone.

the goal of automation like ai is to lessen and ultimately replace human workers anyway

i say accelerate it more so that we can finally vote for ubi like negative income tax so that we can all do our hobbies not for money anymore but just for pure passion and entertainment

@deg

I mean its one thing to push for this in fields like manufacturing, but in creative based jobs like animation, writing, acting, and translation it is an active threat.

@LSSJ_Gaming there is no stopping artists from still being creative in a future with ubi though art will just not be for profit but for passion only

Fansubs > AI subs >>> These garbage official subs

@bentleys This is what people should understand. While AI subs are not ideal, they are better than these garbage official subs.
@KittenCuddler This is the problem with localizers and their defenders. You all hate anime and Japanese people, so you inject your Western influence into it. This is what we all mean when we call you all tourists. The translation needs to be accurate, not "funnier".

@bentleys This is what people should understand. While AI subs are not ideal, they are better than these garbage official subs.
@KittenCuddler This is the problem with localizers and their defenders. You all hate anime and Japanese people, so you inject your Western influence into it. This is what we all mean when we call you all tourists. The translation needs to be accurate, not "funnier".

@bentleys This is what people should understand. While AI subs are not ideal, they are better than these garbage official subs.
@KittenCuddler This is the problem with localizers and their defenders. You all hate anime and Japanese people, so you inject your Western influence into it. This is what we all mean when we call you all tourists. The translation needs to be accurate, not "funnier".

@ShatteredSans using language-model AI is also self-defeating if your goal is accuracy.

one of the major issues of using LMs to do anything where accuracy is a concern (e.g. legal documents) is that they're more concerned with outputting "correct sounding" text than accurate text. in other words, if you ask it to translate, it's more concerned with outputting text that sounds like English than actually translating accurately - sometimes going as far as to make stuff up entirely.

this is almost precisely the type of thing people complain about in translations all the time - that they distort the original meaning in favor of "sounding like English", so I have no idea why people want to move to a tool which would be much *worse* at doing this.

@fbjim I think a bit part of the problem is over-localisation. (Some) Localisers are not aiming at "English", they are being told to aim at "American kids watching in the family home". Since doing what you're told is how you get paid, they're doing that. An AI given the same order would too.

Older anime translators, I feel, were freer to keep some of the alien-ness of Japanese culture without whitewashing it the way that (for example) the initial DeDeDe dub and sub did, which included the removal of a reference to watching porn as well as a moronic "girl power" cry which was clearly supposed to be "relevant to the audience" but sounded completely wrong.

Mass market brings big money and producers -not paid-a-flat-fee translators - will chase it. If they can avoid offending the American Christians who would still to this day happily burn D&D rulebooks then they can make more money.

The poster who said that the only way to be sure is to use your own locally hosted LLM to do the translation is close to the mark. Really the way to be sure is to lean Japanese, which is what I'm doing at the moment. But, really, the only way to be really really sure is to be born Japanese :)

LLMs are currently somewhere between useless and shite. They make stuff up, they get "facts" wrong, they are based on stolen data, they do not remember their own context well. Only the last of these is showing any progress at the moment.

LLMs have, IMO, pretty well hit the limits of their abilities already because all they are is a good trick. They're not intelligent and they don't understand anything, they're just a clever database system with a lot of flaws, but the flaws are inherent in the trick, they're not flaws of execution which can be fixed by more careful coding or something.

Being able to pull off an illusion of flying above a stage doesn't mean you're one step closer to humans being able to float to work. You just have a clever stage-trick.