It looks like the comments hold the real story. They tried to get away with poor quality, apparently machine-translated garbage. It's like you complained to a chef that your steak is overdone so he tosses a raw cut of meat on the table. "FINE! Here it is fucking rare just the way you like it."
Sounds like they are rushing the AI translations, either because they want to go 'well looks like the AI can't do it, may as well get the localisers' or just because they want to ditch the localisers quick and switch to AI to save money.
Easier, but not as accurate as possible. Each translation will introduce some error, so it will compound. It's like rounding errors in floating point math.
Do a round-robin yourself. Take a passage from King Lear in original Shakespearian English and roll it into Chinese ... then into German ... then into Brazilian Portuguese and then back to English.
Hell ... do it with the first chapter of Genesis from the RSV2CE
Korean arguably has even more high-context than Japanese and shoving it through an English translator and immediately translating that into Japanese runs a risk of Backstroke of the West levels of garbo.
The problem with keeping localizers on a leash is you have to be fluently bilingual to vet their work properly. Lots of places won't just have someone with that talent just sitting around to check their contractor's work. You need to be able to trust their work otherwise.
But Western localizers have made it impossible to trust any of them you don't know personally. And with all the constant backbiting and blacklisting even the companies you do think you can trust right now can't be trusted next year.
No examples?
It looks like the comments hold the real story. They tried to get away with poor quality, apparently machine-translated garbage. It's like you complained to a chef that your steak is overdone so he tosses a raw cut of meat on the table. "FINE! Here it is fucking rare just the way you like it."
Sounds like they are rushing the AI translations, either because they want to go 'well looks like the AI can't do it, may as well get the localisers' or just because they want to ditch the localisers quick and switch to AI to save money.
This was a Korean to Japanese machine translation too, it's almost certainly going to be garbage.
Really anything that doesn't start or end in English is going to be years behind in the machine translation game.
There's just not been anywhere near as many man hours of development or AI training.
So meantime, easier to translate from Korean to English then English to Japanese?
Easier, but not as accurate as possible. Each translation will introduce some error, so it will compound. It's like rounding errors in floating point math.
Definitely sounds like a purple monkey dishwasher idea.
Do a round-robin yourself. Take a passage from King Lear in original Shakespearian English and roll it into Chinese ... then into German ... then into Brazilian Portuguese and then back to English.
Hell ... do it with the first chapter of Genesis from the RSV2CE
Enjoy the lulz.
Korean arguably has even more high-context than Japanese and shoving it through an English translator and immediately translating that into Japanese runs a risk of Backstroke of the West levels of garbo.
The problem with keeping localizers on a leash is you have to be fluently bilingual to vet their work properly. Lots of places won't just have someone with that talent just sitting around to check their contractor's work. You need to be able to trust their work otherwise.
But Western localizers have made it impossible to trust any of them you don't know personally. And with all the constant backbiting and blacklisting even the companies you do think you can trust right now can't be trusted next year.
I like tar tar.