Lefty friends sharing this, and I agree a bit
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On the fourth point, "You get what you pay for" predates artificial intelligence by quite a while
The whining about AI translations is funny. Who cares how “good” the translation is? I want to get the gist, not appreciate the flowery language and cleverness of the translator. Maybe if I was reading a book of poetry translated from a different language which I would never do because I’m not fucking gay.
You clearly have never read machine translated manga
It can get really really bad. Realistically languages like Spanish probably not but once you venture off the reservation a bit, shit can get pretty abysmal pretty quickly.
There's a particular Korean web novel story that I like, but that has an abysmally slow translation pace. I mean slow like the story is 673 chapters long, it was finished about 4 years ago, the translation started 6 years ago, and they're still only at chapter 220. There's a machine-translated English version of the story that I tried reading, but I could barely make sense of it.
The story has dozens of characters, some that you don't see for several chapters. Since many of their names have literal translations, it's a huge headache just trying to parse what series of nouns are supposed to be which character, or trying to parse the bad placements of the quotation marks and paragraph separations to try to understand when someone's supposed to be speaking, only internally thinking, or doing an action. It doesn't help that the story has several different PoV characters, and sometimes multiple ones in a single chapter.
I spent about 30 minutes trying to make sense of it, only to completely give up. Maybe machine translations of Korean to English have improved in the past few years since this one was done, but my experience with this has been that it's nowhere near a level that I would consider properly coherent and legible.
The vodka is good but the meat is rotten.
I recall reading an experiment done by economists. They offered people Hershey kisses for 1¢ or a Lindor truffle for 3¢. Recognizing it's a better deal, people preferred the Lindor truffles. Then they lowered their prices a penny. Suddenly, people preferred the Kisses. Turns out people prefer free, even if it's the lesser deal.