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The quality of a translation makes a dramatic difference in the reading experience. I have 4 or more copies of the art of war, each with different translators.

The quality of a translation makes a dramatic difference in the reading experience. I have 4 or more copies of the art of war, each with different translators. Dante’s inferno, the Illiad, Dostoyevsky, Beowulf, Confucius: some translations are unreadable and one or two incredible. Automation is just not going to produce the really good translations. The only benefit of a technique like this will be to generate unlicensed translations of work that will not otherwise get translated, which isn’t even that big a deal because the communities already produce unlicensed translations of just about everything. Edit: The other use is to help create better context aware data scrapers that can combine bi-modal information streams and add some body language understanding. I guess it will probably end up in automated surveillance tech like security cameras/mics etc if it works.

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
I can think of quite a few manga/anime/videogames where a machine translation would've been acceptable because I just needed a bare minimum understanding of what was going on. Think of any number of 8-bit games where the game is 95% hack-and-slash, but a random villager tells you before the last boss fight, "You must make sure to wear the enchanted amulet in order to pierce the dragon's scales!" It's one throwaway line, but if the line is in Japanese, an American playing an imported ROM might spend an hour of frustration wondering why his sword does zero damage to the final boss.
- grawprog 6y ago
  The nes had plenty of real examples where poor translations made the game harder or made secrets obscure and hard to find without a guide. Castlevania 2 and Adventure of link come to mind. Actually, i'd say most text heavy games translated from japanese on the nes suffered from this problem and made those games way more confusing than they should have been.
  - AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
    Sure...but I don't feel like we're comparing apples to apples here, since I explicitly mentioned text-light games and you brought up the most text-heavy, RPG like entries in the respective CV and Zelda series (of that generation). To boot, Simon's Quest also had the atrociously bad idea that NPCs in the game can lie to you and give intentionally incorrect information, making the translation effort that much more confusing.
    - kevingadd 6y ago
      If a low-quality machine translation is sufficient to make those games playable because they're text-light, I question whether that's actually any better than having a human who knows the language spend an hour swapping the text out instead. You'd be surprised how often machine TL will muck up things like menu options or item names. The appeal of automated TL makes way more sense if it means saving hundreds of hours of localization work (not that it does...)
      - johnnyanmac 6y ago
        mostly because it would take more than an hour and involves a translator interested. I sure can't speak Japanese (yet), but I have enough technical chops to spend a few hours getting something workable out with this alone. Then from there maybe I can trigger Cunningham's law and get the attention of someone who knows what they are doing. Sounds like a win-win for me.
- JohnBooty 6y ago
  This could be good for games, but I think any manga/prose that's simplistic enough to be boiled down to purely functional phrases like "wear the amulet to fight the dragon" would probably not be worth a read...
  - numpad0 6y ago
    “Shorter/simpler/obvious the sentence is the easier it must be” isn’t actually the case with translations. UI strings being short usually means hidden heavy context lies in visual elements, so it’ll just strengthen hilarity in mistakes like “Name: SQL Server, Province/Prefecture: Running” (because you know, equivalents to provinces in a region are called “State” in American English...). “Province” is more or less harmless, but “(has/is/is in/to/like to)Start(ed/ing) type of errors due to missing context can make UI unusable. Oh and it’s un-spottable by non-speakers because they make sense when translated back to original languages.
  - Aerroon 6y ago
    People read entire machine translated novels. It's not too uncommon with Chinese xianxia/xuanhuan novels. We're talking thousands of pages. It's not as incomprehensible as you might think. I didn't find it enjoyable though. I can certainly see a place for automatically translated manga. It's not a sellable product though.
    - JohnBooty 6y ago
      I didn't find it enjoyable though Sure, yeah - I think we're on the same page. My post was a reference to enjoyability more than functionality. I have definitely read novels that were long, yet rote and simplistic even in their native language. =) But they were not works worth reading in any language IMO. They could probably be satisfactorily machine translated (with some human editing) but the result would not be enjoyable except for ultra diehards of the genre who are simply happy to be reading a work from that particular genre, quality of prose be damned. Those enjoyable xianxia/xuanhuan you mention were either rote and boring in the first place, or they were wonderfully written and had the life crushed out of them by a machine translation that dispensed with all nuance.
- hinkley 6y ago
  "You must wear a desirable necklace to surpass the balances of the great lizard"
  - rictic 6y ago
    A bad translation can improve bad writing. By using unfamiliar phrasing and word choice it decontextualizes, allowing the player to imagine meanings and nuance where it isn't there.
    - kevingadd 6y ago
      I get what you're going at, but I think it fundamentally misunderstands something. If the writing is bad, there's nothing that can really "improve" it other than the original author cleaning it up with the help of an editor. A bad translation is effectively a new work, at best inspired by the original bad script. You could replace a bad Japanese script with a "good" English one - this has happened before - but at that point it's questionable whether any translation has happened at all, you're mostly writing new content inspired by the original work or adhering to broad constraints. What I'd say you're doing here is improving the experience of playing the game, but you haven't done anything meaningful to the writing or script. In a few cases western companies have licensed Japanese works and spliced them together with entirely new plots for overseas audiences - Robotech is one infamous example where arguably there was nothing wrong with the source material and the result wasn't just a liberal translation.
      - lmm 6y ago
        > If the writing is bad, there's nothing that can really "improve" it other than the original author cleaning it up with the help of an editor. A bad translation is effectively a new work, at best inspired by the original bad script. You could replace a bad Japanese script with a "good" English one - this has happened before - but at that point it's questionable whether any translation has happened at all, you're mostly writing new content inspired by the original work or adhering to broad constraints. What distinction are you drawing between working with an editor vs working with a translator? Often it's a very similar process, and there are cases where something is cleaned up in a translation and then that gets incorporated back into the next edition in the original language.
- drran 6y ago
  Whole world, except English-speaking countries, have/had exactly this experience.
guts 6y ago
I am not sure if you have looked at the paper once, but they talk about context aware translation only.
cbhl 6y ago
I think the sweet spot is machine-assisted translation. If you can get the output to be 90-95% correct, you can then display the raw and the machine output side-by-side, and have a human make corrections inline. Instead of a team of four working around the clock for a day or two, maybe you could have a translation as fast as it takes to proofread it three or four times end-to-end. Rev is the same idea in the speech transcription space -- they have humans listen to the audio and fix up a machine-generated transcription.
- cinntaile 6y ago
  I think you underestimate the amount of work that's required when "proofreading", you need another translator that could have done the work themselves. And it's not like you can just exchange a few words here and there and consider it done. If a human has to make corrections they'll likely rewrite the entire sentence and then the advantage of machine-assisted translation is pretty much gone. Overall you'll save time but the amount of time saved is probably less than what we think.
  - numpad0 6y ago
    I think I’ve come across a PSA about this scheme. The story was that unaware translators puts discount on proofreading, so some clients send in dummy machine translation to qualify as “proofreading” task to get full translation at proofreading pricing.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  I've seen some people run visual novels through automated translations in aggregate like this: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/muvluv/images/8/89/Be_a_good_boy_and_you_might_get_a_MiG-27_for_Christmas.jpg https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/muvluv/images/8/89/Be_a_go... You can definitely get some of the gist in there, but some of the automated translations are just way off. And pretty much none of them result in good prose. In addition, none of the translations get the names fully correct, so you definitely need someone to go and fix it.
- numpad0 6y ago
  You can’t get output to be “90-95% correct” from machine translation. People think of language translation as some sort of same dimension transformation but it’s more like re-projection that involve rotation in upper dimension. Simple warping goes only so far, neural networks give some uncanny slurries, human artists add a lot of their own brush strokes and it’s a lossy process both ways. Speech transcription is much more straightforward because speakers are supposed to have corresponding single literal expressions for each segments of voice.
johnnyanmac 6y ago
I think the potential of this tool, like many industry tools, is to streamline the translation process, not completely automate it. I can see this speeding up the process and lightening the load on stuff like typesetters, even if the final translation isn't perfect.
Vadoff 6y ago
I've read a few Light Novels (no text bubbles, little to no pictures) that were machine translated, and they've all been horrible to read through - you could barely make sense of the sentences, and the whole reading experience became frustrating rather than pleasurable.
Aeolun 6y ago
> which isn’t even that big a deal because the communities already produce unlicensed translations of just about everything I think those community translators will be very happy to have some of their work automated.

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

I can think of quite a few manga/anime/videogames where a machine translation would've been acceptable because I just needed a bare minimum understanding of what was going on. Think of any number of 8-bit games where the game is 95% hack-and-slash, but a random villager tells you before the last boss fight, "You must make sure to wear the enchanted amulet in order to pierce the dragon's scales!" It's one throwaway line, but if the line is in Japanese, an American playing an imported ROM might spend an hour of frustration wondering why his sword does zero damage to the final boss.

grawprog 6y ago
The nes had plenty of real examples where poor translations made the game harder or made secrets obscure and hard to find without a guide. Castlevania 2 and Adventure of link come to mind. Actually, i'd say most text heavy games translated from japanese on the nes suffered from this problem and made those games way more confusing than they should have been.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  Sure...but I don't feel like we're comparing apples to apples here, since I explicitly mentioned text-light games and you brought up the most text-heavy, RPG like entries in the respective CV and Zelda series (of that generation). To boot, Simon's Quest also had the atrociously bad idea that NPCs in the game can lie to you and give intentionally incorrect information, making the translation effort that much more confusing.
  - kevingadd 6y ago
    If a low-quality machine translation is sufficient to make those games playable because they're text-light, I question whether that's actually any better than having a human who knows the language spend an hour swapping the text out instead. You'd be surprised how often machine TL will muck up things like menu options or item names. The appeal of automated TL makes way more sense if it means saving hundreds of hours of localization work (not that it does...)
    - johnnyanmac 6y ago
      mostly because it would take more than an hour and involves a translator interested. I sure can't speak Japanese (yet), but I have enough technical chops to spend a few hours getting something workable out with this alone. Then from there maybe I can trigger Cunningham's law and get the attention of someone who knows what they are doing. Sounds like a win-win for me.
JohnBooty 6y ago
This could be good for games, but I think any manga/prose that's simplistic enough to be boiled down to purely functional phrases like "wear the amulet to fight the dragon" would probably not be worth a read...
- numpad0 6y ago
  “Shorter/simpler/obvious the sentence is the easier it must be” isn’t actually the case with translations. UI strings being short usually means hidden heavy context lies in visual elements, so it’ll just strengthen hilarity in mistakes like “Name: SQL Server, Province/Prefecture: Running” (because you know, equivalents to provinces in a region are called “State” in American English...). “Province” is more or less harmless, but “(has/is/is in/to/like to)Start(ed/ing) type of errors due to missing context can make UI unusable. Oh and it’s un-spottable by non-speakers because they make sense when translated back to original languages.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  People read entire machine translated novels. It's not too uncommon with Chinese xianxia/xuanhuan novels. We're talking thousands of pages. It's not as incomprehensible as you might think. I didn't find it enjoyable though. I can certainly see a place for automatically translated manga. It's not a sellable product though.
  - JohnBooty 6y ago
    I didn't find it enjoyable though Sure, yeah - I think we're on the same page. My post was a reference to enjoyability more than functionality. I have definitely read novels that were long, yet rote and simplistic even in their native language. =) But they were not works worth reading in any language IMO. They could probably be satisfactorily machine translated (with some human editing) but the result would not be enjoyable except for ultra diehards of the genre who are simply happy to be reading a work from that particular genre, quality of prose be damned. Those enjoyable xianxia/xuanhuan you mention were either rote and boring in the first place, or they were wonderfully written and had the life crushed out of them by a machine translation that dispensed with all nuance.
hinkley 6y ago
"You must wear a desirable necklace to surpass the balances of the great lizard"
- rictic 6y ago
  A bad translation can improve bad writing. By using unfamiliar phrasing and word choice it decontextualizes, allowing the player to imagine meanings and nuance where it isn't there.
  - kevingadd 6y ago
    I get what you're going at, but I think it fundamentally misunderstands something. If the writing is bad, there's nothing that can really "improve" it other than the original author cleaning it up with the help of an editor. A bad translation is effectively a new work, at best inspired by the original bad script. You could replace a bad Japanese script with a "good" English one - this has happened before - but at that point it's questionable whether any translation has happened at all, you're mostly writing new content inspired by the original work or adhering to broad constraints. What I'd say you're doing here is improving the experience of playing the game, but you haven't done anything meaningful to the writing or script. In a few cases western companies have licensed Japanese works and spliced them together with entirely new plots for overseas audiences - Robotech is one infamous example where arguably there was nothing wrong with the source material and the result wasn't just a liberal translation.
    - lmm 6y ago
      > If the writing is bad, there's nothing that can really "improve" it other than the original author cleaning it up with the help of an editor. A bad translation is effectively a new work, at best inspired by the original bad script. You could replace a bad Japanese script with a "good" English one - this has happened before - but at that point it's questionable whether any translation has happened at all, you're mostly writing new content inspired by the original work or adhering to broad constraints. What distinction are you drawing between working with an editor vs working with a translator? Often it's a very similar process, and there are cases where something is cleaned up in a translation and then that gets incorporated back into the next edition in the original language.
drran 6y ago
Whole world, except English-speaking countries, have/had exactly this experience.

guts 6y ago

I am not sure if you have looked at the paper once, but they talk about context aware translation only.

cbhl 6y ago

I think the sweet spot is machine-assisted translation. If you can get the output to be 90-95% correct, you can then display the raw and the machine output side-by-side, and have a human make corrections inline. Instead of a team of four working around the clock for a day or two, maybe you could have a translation as fast as it takes to proofread it three or four times end-to-end. Rev is the same idea in the speech transcription space -- they have humans listen to the audio and fix up a machine-generated transcription.

cinntaile 6y ago
I think you underestimate the amount of work that's required when "proofreading", you need another translator that could have done the work themselves. And it's not like you can just exchange a few words here and there and consider it done. If a human has to make corrections they'll likely rewrite the entire sentence and then the advantage of machine-assisted translation is pretty much gone. Overall you'll save time but the amount of time saved is probably less than what we think.
- numpad0 6y ago
  I think I’ve come across a PSA about this scheme. The story was that unaware translators puts discount on proofreading, so some clients send in dummy machine translation to qualify as “proofreading” task to get full translation at proofreading pricing.
Hamuko 6y ago
I've seen some people run visual novels through automated translations in aggregate like this: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/muvluv/images/8/89/Be_a_good_boy_and_you_might_get_a_MiG-27_for_Christmas.jpg https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/muvluv/images/8/89/Be_a_go... You can definitely get some of the gist in there, but some of the automated translations are just way off. And pretty much none of them result in good prose. In addition, none of the translations get the names fully correct, so you definitely need someone to go and fix it.
numpad0 6y ago
You can’t get output to be “90-95% correct” from machine translation. People think of language translation as some sort of same dimension transformation but it’s more like re-projection that involve rotation in upper dimension. Simple warping goes only so far, neural networks give some uncanny slurries, human artists add a lot of their own brush strokes and it’s a lossy process both ways. Speech transcription is much more straightforward because speakers are supposed to have corresponding single literal expressions for each segments of voice.

johnnyanmac 6y ago

I think the potential of this tool, like many industry tools, is to streamline the translation process, not completely automate it. I can see this speeding up the process and lightening the load on stuff like typesetters, even if the final translation isn't perfect.

Vadoff 6y ago

I've read a few Light Novels (no text bubbles, little to no pictures) that were machine translated, and they've all been horrible to read through - you could barely make sense of the sentences, and the whole reading experience became frustrating rather than pleasurable.

Aeolun 6y ago

> which isn’t even that big a deal because the communities already produce unlicensed translations of just about everything I think those community translators will be very happy to have some of their work automated.