Ghostwire: Tokyo English subs quietly remove “all property is theft” line
An improperly translated line in the English subs for Ghostwire: Tokyo has been fixed, omitting the socialist quote that had nothing to do with the original Japanese. Back when Ghostwire: Tokyo…
Don't be surprised if the next thing to get AI translation is games.
I'll be honest, the more they use and refine AI translation, the more they might be able to lower piracy since one of the things that made it so rampant was the slow process of having it translated into another language.
If thanks to AI you can release it simultaneously with the original Japanese work, you might see a reduction in piracy. Cutting out the leftist ideologues too is just icing on the cake.
The problem with that is that it will only remove the translator's job, not the localizers.
Because Japanese grammar is basically incompatible with being hard translated, especially informally. It will require at minimum some editting to even make the slightest bit of sense, and realistically someone to still compare the original text to what the machine spat out and fill in the gaps.
So we aren't in any better shape with AI, unless you are after pure Hard MTL. Which, if you've read the manga who use that, is basically so fucking garbage that its basically like reading the cliffs notes version of the story. Even if you don't care about the story, you'll still end up with the early Nintendo level translations where outright quests and clues are completely botched into trial/error gameplay.
It's still worth advancing the use of AI and trying to see if we can get it to the point it can do the localisers job too fully.
That's how bad current localisers are, that we'd pursue years of development and investment because they couldn't keep ideology out of their work.
The problem is that AI is now being trained by "sensitivity" trainers by all the major tech branches.
While the translations may be close to accurate, it will also be infected by the same sort of "sensibilities" as the typical localisers.
The only reliable AI translators would be open-source ones maintained by pure linguists who have zero propensities for "sensitivity" readings.
The California ones, the Asian, Indian, hell even Russian and Middle East ones if they have programs FULLY accept racism in fact it's a core feature.
It's why they'll be more advanced than the western variety, the West is deliberately crippling development by trying to make it use pronouns and other bullshit while the ones outside the bubble are advancing to the point that they could easily do advanced cyberattacks on a whim.
And as much as some people want to be doomers about it, I think it is only a matter of time until a Western AI comes up that was made out of the bubble. Much of what we are dealing with in tech and entertainment is a product of the fact that this was all done in basically two places in California. But tech has already been taking off in other parts of the country with people who were never in the bubble (there are more tech companies in Dallas, TX than Silicon Valley now) and entertainment is slowly doing the same, eventually someone is going to decide they are leaving money on the table.
I wouldn't ever advocate not pursuing it, but I don't see AI making much of a change on the legitimate industry's issues.
Its just extremely unlucky for us all that the one country producing the media everyone wants to consume is the one with the most fucking absurd language. Because if it was Spanish or French cartoons, the AI would already be able to supplant them all.
Unfortunately, that language barrier might've been one of the reasons they aren't infected as badly as say the French and Spanish with leftist ideology.
That and China, if you live in close proximity to China and want to remain independent you have to at least be resistant to subversion.
What do you think a translator does? It's not just replace language A word X with language B word Y. LLMs can translate one grammar to another just fine.
What localizers do is try to replace cultural references that a different region wouldn't understand. Like if someone made a one-off Dr Seuss reference, it might not make sense to a Japanese audience and localizers will substitute that.
Clearly I was in the wrong to assume the professional industry operates similarly to the piracy industry of scanlation, where usually a Jap guy who speaks a little English drops a rough direct translation and then a different guy localizes it into something that sounds readable.
Yep. Fan translations often leave the weird cultural references intact and add a footnote to explain it. Professionals assume that will be a jarring experience and rewrite it.
And those fuckwits will bitch and whine but after a stunt like this they kind of had it coming.
My understanding of the problem is that the japanese language is uniquely difficult to translate because the listener has to know who the speaker is addressing in order to interpret modality.
To brazenly oversimplify it, in Japanese, "the royal we" is all over the bed.
AI-related tech is coming to many areas.
Here's an Addon for World of Warcraft: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/voiceover
It's gigabytes of pre-generated AI voice to make every NPC in the game fully voiced. It's pretty amazing. Is it as good as a good voice actor? No. Is it better than a shitty voice actor, better than voice in 1990s games, and better than nothing? Very much so. It's only get to get better too.
Nope, still never buying it. I don't want apologies and I don't want retractions.
Cross this line even once, and it's the permanent shit list.
the game as a whole is pretty average, makes sense since (if i remember correctly) it was made from scraps that were left over from Evil Within 3 failed development
It's the reason I'm hesitant on Lies of P. Why the fuck would they have made a current fucking day message in that game of all places? They removed it before release, but having done it at all makes me worry.
Wait, what happened in Lies of P? First time hearing there was any issue.
Supposedly there was an "APAB" ("P" for "puppets") sign somewhere in the demo opening, removed just before release. Doesn't matter what it was trying to convey, it used a modern divisive message ("current fucking day). And it only makes me concerned if there was other shit like that.
You don't need to explain it or yourself. I just needed something to work with to look into. Cheers mate.
That kind of purity spiral doesn't end well.
It ends with me not spending my money on devs/studios that output Marxist propaganda.
I won't patronize businesses that advocate for me to be a tax slave. Regardless of why.
Why would that not end well, precisely?
Well technically the devs were not the ones who did that it was the translators/localizers that did that. But the localizers should be vetted. But yeah i dont like the translators getting money either, its why i didnt buy the sequel of TWEWY because the translators were trash and translated it wrongly and in a woke way.
And? They paid for that product and greenlighted it for sale.
Them not bothering to check on the translation they paid for doesn't make it better, it makes it worse.
Yeah, i added the part where i didnt buy the sequel of TWEWY because of the bad translators either.
Sony has been doing this for years, in addition to those ridiculous censorship policies.
The fact that they hadn't been vetting sooner is the problem.
Having any standards whatsoever is the new “purity spiral”.
On that note though, I think that as the Woke system starts to fall apart over the next few years, we are going to see more of this. Where companies try to have their cake and eat it too, by still trying to not piss off the SJW's on Twitter or in the Press, but also try to not piss off the now obviously much large portion of paying customers. And it will end when they decide they finally have to pick a side.
Ends well for my wallet
For me, too long. The Japanese devs have known about the English botched version since its release. It takes literally an hour, tops, to draft a quick tweet saying "we've sacked the localization, we're working with a new one", but it has been many, many more hours than just 1, since the game's release.
Did they fire the commie shill?
It's so cool that you can complain about localizer vandalism to Japanese companies and they actually respond and fix it. Better if they never hired the localizers to begin with but you can't expect them to be as experienced with social justice people like we are.
Huh, I took that line entirely differently than what it apparently means. I assumed it was something like: If you cut down a tree to build a home you're 'stealing' it from the birds that nested in it, the bugs that lived in it, etc...