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- cross-posted to:
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That’s a field I can answer in a professional capacity (my work involves translations for almost 20 years now). MTL is a great tool if used by a translator. A tool that provides a rough draft for a human translator as a starting point. If used as such, it vastly (I cannot stress this enough) speeds up the translation process without losing the quality of the translation.
CR, on the other hand, seems to use it as a replacement for the human translator, where the MTL is the end product.
Personally, I feel very conflicted about this. Obviously, I want good and accurate translations as a best-case scenario. But between human translators using the platform to inject their own views and agendas into the script, and broken and faulty MTL, I take the latter.
I’m sorry to those who expected quality and for the ethics of CR to be more than lip service.
While this is some bs from a worker perspective, this is also one of the main places LLMs thrive: translation.
If it weren’t for the fact that they are sidestepping the cost of a translator (and subsequently costing someone(s) a job), I’d actually be not appalled by this.
This fairly anecdotal, but LLMs aren’t that good at translating Japanese. From what I’ve seen they are pretty good with many other languages, but they really struggle with Japanese → English translations, possibly because the languages are so very different. I have yet to see a machine translation of more than a couple paragraphs of native content that didn’t make huge mistakes on the nuances. A lot of times there isn’t even a straightforward translation from Japanese to English. The first example that comes to mind is the “Watashi… Watakushi? Boku? Ore?” from Your Name, which, using a direct translation, just means “I… I? I? I?”.
It can’t be worse than some of the netflix translations.
I just watched Apothecary Diaries with the wife. The subtitles are basicly fanfiction. I know characters reply wakarimasu a lot but you don’t need to make up dialog. The new stuff often conflicts with the actual story.
LLMs should be good for translation, but the thing is that they aren’t, for two main reasons:
First, the avoidable problem: CR is running them on the audio, not the script. The AI is mishearing stuff all the time, leading to inconsistent character naming and nonsensical sentences. There are a few CR anime this season that are extremely hard to follow at times because the AI subtitles can’t even begin to understand what’s happening.
Second, a more permanent problem: translation of fiction is much more of an art than a science. Translators don’t just translate words, they translate connotation and tone, as well. A translator interprets the meaning of the lines - what information is being conveyed, spoken or unspoken - and tries to put that same meaning into a different sentence. This is a task that LLMs are going to struggle with a lot. For example, how is the AI going to convey that there’s been a pun, or a reference to a well-known turn of phrase, or an innuendo using words with multiple meanings?
ETA: if you truly think this is fine (worker issues aside) I recommend giving necronomico a watch
There’s also a third problem: visual context. Someone translating a manga or anime would normally be able to see what’s happening, which can be essential when translating certain otherwise-ambiguous lines.
