This week's poll was modified from something that icassop suggested. What's your opinion on machine translations?

You can submit poll ideas here
http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=3903

Previous Poll Results:
Question: How do you feel when looking back at your childhood?
Choices:
Happy and nostalgic - votes: 1684 (60.2%)
Sad and regretful - votes: 1115 (39.8%)
There were 2799 total votes.
The poll ended: February 12th, 2022 8:36am PST

Awww, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed youth

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

I usually hate them, because they suck most of the time. But from time to time you'll find one that is written in correct English and makes sense. No clue if those translations are actually correct, but at least the sentences make sense.

Good MTL is good. Bad MTL is almost cancer. You can use it for small paragraphs where you only need to get an idea of what it means, but for anything more complex, you need really really good MTL or an actual person who can translate well (there are also translators that suck, so it's not like they are always better.)

Machine translations are horrible. Anytime I read those translations, I just keep thinking myself “people don’t talk like that.” The dialogue always sounds like broken English and professional translation is better overall.

Always hate them. Those aren´t translations. Full stop but it´s mostly an issue web/light novels have to deal with so I don´t even need to care.

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

People who say machine translations are fine, especially for manga or light novels, have no clue. If someone in the scanlation group turns the "translations" into proper English, most readers will believe that the group did a great job, even when the text is completely wrong. Sadly bad English is usually the only indicator of a bad translation, so with good English we're naturally led to believe that it's a great translation.

That said, machine translations are fine if the translator is somewhat decent at the language and just wants a "second opinion" or a base translation they can work with.

I agree with others comments i voted They're fine but i was thinking of people who tried their best but had to use "Machine Translations". 😳

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My perfect sentence when someone suspect me : "I'm not suspect, it's not me I swear"

They're fine I guess. If they're proofread and it makes sense in the scope of the story. Even if some like nuances change, the overall meaning can still be understood. Except when the grammar is so poor that it would be better to just not.

Last edited by F_J at 2:10 pm, Feb 12 2022

Always hate them

For the people voting "they're fine", you have no idea what you're talking about and have never studied Japanese at all. For the people voting "I don't care", you have a right to your opinion but I find it sad that you don't value the contents of what you're reading at all. The people voting "love them" are just trolls, obviously.

It's worth noting that someone that has to plug a kanji, or a multi-kanji word, into google translate because they don't know one word in a sentence, isn't "using machine translations". For that exact purpose, google translate is basically just a faster dictionary. And that kind of thing happens all the time to budding translators.

But try to translate a sentence, paragraph, or entire passage with modern software (while admittedly better than 15 years ago with babelfish!) and then convert it to "grammatical english", and chances are WAY too high that you've completely misrepresented what the author intended to convey, and that's not okay.

exactly this. people who are confident in their mtl or those that deem it as acceptable dont know how wrong they are. mtls are just largely guesswork, most times producing almost an entirely different script. i remember this one group that claimed their translations as being accurate despite being mtl. their work was eloquent enough in english when accuracy-wise they couldn't be more off. 70% of the lines were different in meaning. "kill that bastard." -> "you really killed her?" character was revealed to be alive and the subject was someone else.

a google search is not enough because they either will not understand the full context or go about it in the wrong way. like looking up the individual characters instead of the word as whole and turning 廃人 into abandoned person. mtls are fine if they are paired with basic knowledge of the language. most times they are not.

Last edited by MaskingTape at 3:56 pm, Feb 12 2022

They're fine.
I my case If the story is engaging enough I can overcome barriers such as the series not being fully translated. I mean I'm totally fine and can read mtl novels (In many cases WN aren't even published in English and and we only get to see licensed adaptations of them). I've already used google lens on many pages where the source material is published ,like OPM amongst others... I've even read mtl stuff in Portuguese... 😛

Honestly speaking manga/manwa/... is too heavily influenced by editors, most of the ongoing series are mainstream versions on what the could've been . When most scanations newly target series that are not only similar, they have been brought into the spotlight by legal means by the same company or come from one that has an already established and popular series.

If the series isn't a well known author it'll probably end up axed/a rushed ending the second it's popularity descends if it's getting serialised and if it isn't it can be discontinued , forcefully bought, plagiarised ... Sometimes a discussion with the editors may lead to the author never finishing it for legal reasons... Yet there are tons of series with proper endings that won't get any translations you can mtl. 😔

Last edited by Joese at 4:00 pm, Feb 12 2022

Always hate them
Machine translators have no persistence as they're fed text bubble-by-bubble, so they have no idea of the context and thus no way to choose the correct meaning among the N possible ones. So you end up with "translations" where characters' names change page by page, or the dialogue says one thing while the drawings show entirely another.

And yet somehow there's always the readers that don't care and even attack the ones pointing out the faults in the translations "hey what are you complaining about free stuff, you're demotivating the group, what if they drop the series". Well IMO for all the effort they put into their release it's hardly a loss.

BTW I found that a quite good indicator of something being MTL'd is whether they've left handwritten text out of bubbles (that isn't SFXs) untranslated, I suppose because OCR had trouble picking it up...

Hate them with a passion. It’s not just about incorrect grammar and awkward English, it’s also about completely butchering the actual meaning of the original text and killing any nuance in the original work. It’s downright disrespectful to the author to have their work changed into something else that’s entirely different from what they wrote but still have it labelled as if this is what they wanted to convey in their story. Any criticism they get for that trash is unjustified and unfair, and yet they still do, because MACHINE TRANSLATIONS KEEP BEING PUMPED OUT WITH NO REGARD OR RESPECT FOR THE AUTHOR WHATSOEVER

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I agree with most of the reasoning above. MTL is distracting and offer less accurate meaning. I'm not English native speaker but sometimes I can tell when the word chosen is confusing as hell lol. I think some scans group just wanted to make chapter releases quick...not that I don't understand the pain looking up the dictionary all the time. Japanese is tricky, even translating titles can be extra hard without reference/furigana. But it would be good if they put the effort!

Always hate them. There's no need for explanations or excuses. I'd rather never read a manga/novel than read an MTL. At least then I'm not completely misunderstanding everything about the plot and the characters while living in "blissful" ignorance of that fact.

Last edited by calstine at 9:05 pm, Feb 12 2022

The results that can be produced with the modern AI MTLs are actually very good, for >90% of all dialog. Together they do even better. Correct translations are not some kind of miracle. However, the examples all of us think of when we see "MTL" is 100% down to incompetent scanlators. People who have no business translating to English, because they can't produce proper English.

No reader could recognise a MTL with competent proofing unless they read the actual source, or if the 'translator' admits to it. Even translators who actually speak the source language can fall flat, because the way they have translated the dialog is not clearly legible.

But the thing is, it would be very rare for a scanlator to seriously use an MTL if they care about producing good results. It takes way too long to get a good result, and it's essentially guaranteed that if it doesn't – the result is missing something. It's almost always not worth the effort since there's actual bilinguals you could team up with instead.


Anyway, this poll should really include the option As long as the English is correct... but I guess with all that said, such examples are so rare that in the first place they're not even relevant.