Forum - View topicNEWS: TO Books Launches English Corona EX Manga Site With Machine Translation
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Dark Mac
Posts: 313 |
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I feel like we need to identify the individual executives who make these decisions. Unless they receive feedback, they won't stop.
[EDIT: Made the context a little less extreme. -TK] |
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DamianSalazar
Posts: 722 |
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I saw this on Twitter and Reddit yesterday. It's great to see TO Books put their name amongst the Japanese manga publishers investing in the English language manga business, but this is the worst way to do it (though not as bad as K Manga; looking at you, Kodansha).
Do they really expect people to pay $5 for some licensed series with decent translation and lettering and some future unlicensed work with shoddy, unsupervised translation? I'm get the feeling that Japanese publishers try too hard in understanding how the West works and it ends up falling flat on their face. For example, this, K Manga and Manga UP! |
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Azure Chrysanthemum
Posts: 115 |
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Ah yes, Ascendance of a Bookworm, a notoriously easy book to translate that doesn't contain a bunch of complicated fantasy names and German terms. Brilliant.
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DamianSalazar
Posts: 722 |
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From the looks of things, they're going to put J-Novel Club's translations of the manga (Part 1, 2, and 3) on their site. It's the ones that aren't licensed (like Part 4 of the manga) that people should be concerned about. |
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RobbiRobb
 Posts: 45 |
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I've flipped through a few pages of The Swordwoman With Curse and yeah, it's pretty bad. I wouldn't call it a terrible translation since I've seen worse but you can obviously tell that not only is it a machine translation but also it's an untouched translation. It reads really rough, contains untranslated parts and errors like this, which is an error I've encountered myself when translating stuff, the original probably contains something along the lines of "え", as in the expression of confusion or something like that.
And that is something that makes the whole thing unenjoyable, because someone who has no knowledge of the Japanese language will be utterly confused by this. Why is it there? What does it mean? I'd like to argue for a reason to use machine translations in manga translations, but it's really hard to find justification for it. Spending a lot of time on fixing machine translations to get the text up to decent quality is a nice thing, but why would anyone do this in a situation where money is involved? Paying a translator who actually knows the language will probably cost a similar amount in the long run, they are more expensive but will complete the translation faster. The only place I can really see machine translations work for manga translations is in scanlating. I even have done so myself, spending a lot of time to use multiple tools to get a presentable and understandable result. Of course it's not going to be up to the quality of a paid translator translating a work, but it can still be better than whatever this wreck is. And if it helps bring otherwise unavailable stories to people than it might actually be worth the time. But in cases like this, where money is involved, I don't think using machine translations is justifiyable, we have a long way to go before those can be compared to someone who actually understands the language and gets the context of the work they are translating. |
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Cho_Desu
 Posts: 194 |
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Saw a few pages shared, and yeah, horrendous quality, no surprise there. Tons of people will think it's fine though, so expect this trend to continue in the years to come.
Sharing their site name with the coronavirus is apt, at least. |
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samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2231 Location: San Antonio, USA |
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To be clear we DO have the license for Part 4 we just haven't gotten to translating it yet, Quof is only mortal. But TO Books can do what they want with their books on their own website, so until we've gotten to the translation, this is it. |
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Netero
Posts: 163 |
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Can't you just have them uploaded to an LLM? Maybe that could even bring the AoB release time each week forward an hour or two 
Seriously though, this is going to run and run. Musos are complaining right now about the use of AI and want it stopped, but talk like that didn't help the weavers in the early 19th century with their rallying cry of "smash the machines" because when it comes down to it, all companies are interested in is reducing cost and increasing profit (that's what they exist for, after all). The only real way to combat it is to refuse to pay for so-called "translated" manga and insist on buying only quality translations done by skilled human translators. Yeah, like Quof. |
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Yuvelir
 Posts: 1572 |
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If you won't pay for the translation, neither will I.
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MFrontier
Posts: 11333 |
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Well, that's disappointing.
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Dark Mac
Posts: 313 |
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The thing about AI is that you can use it yourself to translate stuff as well as companies can use it to translate their own stuff. There's no reason to rely on those companies' translated products. |
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Wyvern
 Posts: 1561 |
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The gross irony of having a book-loving character like Myne represent a site that uses AI translation to butcher the quality of authors' writing. Just the worst.
Also, $4.50 a month? Hell, no. If you're not going to pay a translator to work on these series then what am I paying you for? |
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rickroll10000
Posts: 23 |
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Machine translation should be banned
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Ashen Phoenix
 Posts: 2912 |
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I already had a bad feeling about this. Then the examples came in and hoo, boy. That lack of quality makes an otherwise enjoyable series unreadable.
If a company isn't willing to pay actual translators (who are already underpaid and underappreciated), they don't value their product or customers enough for me to waste time and money. |
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