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
I talked about it in the past. My work is involved with translating or working with translators so I can speak from first hand experience on this topic.We don’t work with prose though. The quality of the translation tools and quality of the translated texts made such a huge jump in recent years that I don’t really see it any worse than what a human translator gives us most of the time. It still needs human correction and QA by us but how much of it needs correction is getting less and less in huge leaps and bounds. And those tools are improving at a scary pace.
How well does that work for prose? I can’t say. If we look at Tearoom Empire’s change of translators in volume 9 (iirc) you can clearly see that there is an art to translating prose, and I wouldn’t trust AI to translate at the highest level of translation the first Tearmoon translator produced. But it could easily see it producing a quality translation on the level of the second one. And if I think about all the light novels I’ve read so far, I would say that most of them are only mid at best in that regard. A computer can produce consistent quality where even the best human translator might just wing it here and there if they have a bad couple of weeks.
Then there is the problem with translators injecting their personal biases and political beliefs into the work. Just take the anime translation of Dragon Maid as an extreme example of what I mean.
example
I take a mid AI translation every time over an ideology injected version.
If that’s an extreme example I think the problem is probably exaggerated. Also, I’d bet a big reason that change was made was to match the lip flaps better - something that’s considered high-priority with anime dubs and which I’m guessing AI is quite bad at right now.
No. The translator doubled down on twitter when this aired and people complained about it. She crashed out and wrote about it extensively. I think the account is deleted since (fled to bluesky) but there should be articles about this shitstorm still.
I talked about it in the past. My work is involved with translating or working with translators so I can speak from first hand experience on this topic.We don’t work with prose though. The quality of the translation tools and quality of the translated texts made such a huge jump in recent years that I don’t really see it any worse than what a human translator gives us most of the time. It still needs human correction and QA by us but how much of it needs correction is getting less and less in huge leaps and bounds. And those tools are improving at a scary pace.
How well does that work for prose? I can’t say. If we look at Tearoom Empire’s change of translators in volume 9 (iirc) you can clearly see that there is an art to translating prose, and I wouldn’t trust AI to translate at the highest level of translation the first Tearmoon translator produced. But it could easily see it producing a quality translation on the level of the second one. And if I think about all the light novels I’ve read so far, I would say that most of them are only mid at best in that regard. A computer can produce consistent quality where even the best human translator might just wing it here and there if they have a bad couple of weeks.
Then there is the problem with translators injecting their personal biases and political beliefs into the work. Just take the anime translation of Dragon Maid as an extreme example of what I mean.
example
I take a mid AI translation every time over an ideology injected version.
If that’s an extreme example I think the problem is probably exaggerated. Also, I’d bet a big reason that change was made was to match the lip flaps better - something that’s considered high-priority with anime dubs and which I’m guessing AI is quite bad at right now.
No. The translator doubled down on twitter when this aired and people complained about it. She crashed out and wrote about it extensively. I think the account is deleted since (fled to bluesky) but there should be articles about this shitstorm still.