i remember that when the ajin anime was first "subbed" shortly after it aired, the subber used google translate to translate the entire thing. i think several lines became jokes within the fandom. luckily ajin already had a fanbase that knew the show was quality and was willing to wait until a better sub came around. but man, that was bad. even as an actual translator, google translate is a terrible choice even for short words or phrases. google translate is pretty good translating within language families that share many qualities e.g. spanish <-> english, but for japanese it's best to go to a japanese-english dictionary. i personally use two online japanese-english dictionaries plus a japanese-japanese dictionary, and then if i have any additional doubts i just start googling the phrase and trying to find explanations on other websites as well. especially if it looks like it might be an idiom or a cultural reference.

so yeah. google translate should never be a resource in any way when translating from japanese. jisho, weblio, goo, and alc's dictionaries are so much better, and jisho.org even has a function where it will literally break down whole phrases for you. it's not even close to perfect ofc but it can be helpful if you can't figure out if something's just an obnoxiously long compound word or actually separate words.

Google translate is the worst thing to use to translate any Asian language lolol.

Google Translate isn't a reliable force for translating manga.
Its better to just learn Japanese then translate/sub the manga/anime.

" I might be cold, but I do have emotion "

What are you all talking about? I just tried JP->EN Google Translate on 私は漫画が好きです and it gave me "I like comics". It works perfectly.

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No is the only option. Machine translations are an insult to the art-form as a whole, end of story. JoJo Part 4 at least had humans on the other end who fucked it up, these are a legend, but what´s funny about a robot.

We could use this topic as a weekly poll...

I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
Manga-Masters, My ANN-Lists + Imdb

No, might as well just leave it untranslated.

This was seriously enlightening. I've just started learning Japanese, so I'm trying to read Shoujo (the easiest to read imo)& translate it on my own but I need to rely heavily on Google translate for the Kanji. More importantly, my conversational Japanese is seriously lacking so I make the same mistakes you pointed out.
Google translate alone, cannot possibly give coherent translations for even slightly more complex sentences than "I like comics"

To translate manga with Google Translate, it is a sin against manganity...

I don't speak/ read understand Japanese, so I can't say much about the accuracy or lack thereof of google translate. What I can say as a bilingual person though is that in order to translate you need to have a very good understanding of both languages. I think people think " well I know this language and that one so I can translate no problem", but what they miss is that you can't literally translate some things because you might miss the bigger picture.
This is a very basic example:
"Príncipe azul" ( blue prince) in Spanish is the same as "knight in shining armor" but if you don't have enough command of both languages, blue knight means absolutely nothing.
Another example " speak of the devil" the literal translation would be " hablando del Diablo", but in reality a better translation is " hablando deal Rey de Roma" ( speaking of the King of Rome) which again in a literal translation would mean nothing to an English speaker.

With all that, I think to best to leave things undone if there is not a strong grasp of the languages involved.

Quote from catandmouse

With all that, I think to best to leave things undone if there is not a strong grasp of the languages involved.

Do you want to eliminate like half of all JP-EN scanlation?

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