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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.