4 ms·

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 wha

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.

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.