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.
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.
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.
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.