As machine translation tools under the banner of AI become increasingly accessible and easy to use, the light novel landscape is at a crossroads. Do light novel publishers compromise their product for more speed, and if so, by how much?
It was shared in AoB subreddit so I am posting this here
“It’s a real, serious failing of human beings that we take 5 years to translate [Ascendance of a Bookworm,] a series of 33 books, while AI does it in an afternoon,” he said.
If I had to guess, most of those five years were spent on a handful of specially problematic chapters, while the bulk of the books was relatively straightforward.
Quof said he does not take MTPE jobs because “I think I have enough skill in Japanese and English that MTL tools do not currently improve my output. It would make my workflow harder because, as one used to providing 97% or higher accuracy, I would feel compelled to fix the AI’s errors up to that high standard, and that would slow me down dramatically.” But over the years, Quof has had a habit of checking his own translations against AI tools.
My experience pretty much matches Quof’s: it takes longer to fix a shitty machine translation than to do it by hand. It is however useful to check how ChatGPT or Google Translate would do it, specially for the problem bits.
I agree. When AI screws things up, it screws it up spectacularly bad. I think AI could be used to check ones work so we don’t get typos in translations but claiming that “AI does it in an afternoon” is a myth. Sure, AI could spit out something in an afternoon but someone would still have to validate it. There’s a reason we wait for and pay for official translations rather than shove it into an AI translator ourselves.
I think AI could be used to check ones work so we don’t get typos in translations
It’s great you mentioned this, because I forgot to do it: AI is a great proofreader. Specially if you’re going to send the stuff to an actual = human proofreader later on; it means they won’t need to pay attention to spelling or grammar, they can focus better on meaning and style.
If I had to guess, most of those five years were spent on a handful of specially problematic chapters, while the bulk of the books was relatively straightforward.
My experience pretty much matches Quof’s: it takes longer to fix a shitty machine translation than to do it by hand. It is however useful to check how ChatGPT or Google Translate would do it, specially for the problem bits.
I agree. When AI screws things up, it screws it up spectacularly bad. I think AI could be used to check ones work so we don’t get typos in translations but claiming that “AI does it in an afternoon” is a myth. Sure, AI could spit out something in an afternoon but someone would still have to validate it. There’s a reason we wait for and pay for official translations rather than shove it into an AI translator ourselves.
It’s great you mentioned this, because I forgot to do it: AI is a great proofreader. Specially if you’re going to send the stuff to an actual = human proofreader later on; it means they won’t need to pay attention to spelling or grammar, they can focus better on meaning and style.