If my monsters are imagined, why do they trigger the motion sensor lights?

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Cake day: February 10th, 2024
  • NineSwords@ani.socialMtoLightNovels@ani.social•What light novel(s) have you read last week, and what do you think about it? [November 03 - November 09]English
    2·
    9 days ago

    <Isekai Walking>: Volume 4 Magic Nation Eva - Dungeon Arc – Good volume. I’ve got little to say about it other than that it was entertaining throughout.

    <The New Gate> Volume 1 - Everything here was triggering a feeling of deja vu, and as it turns out, there was an anime of this last year. The show was so memorable that I completely forgot it even existed, and I had to look it up to see why I seemed to know the LN. That about tells you everything you need to know about the plot.

    <Lacey Longs for Freedom: The Dawn Witch’s Low-Key Life after Defeating the Demon King> Volume 3 - Stupid. Lacey and Wayne invent a new technology called “lens”. Great. If only they weren’t interacting with a character just a couple of pages earlier who was wearing glasses.

  • NineSwords@ani.socialMtoLightNovels@ani.social•[Article] Does the Light Novel Translation Process Need AI?English
    61·
    11 days ago

    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.

  • NineSwords@ani.socialMtoLightNovels@ani.social•What light novel(s) have you read last week, and what do you think about it? [October 27 - November 02]English
    1·
    16 days ago

    <The Twelve Kingdoms> Book 2 - Shadow of the Moon, Shadow of the Sea: Part 2 - the utterly unlikable MC goes through some character development and becomes tolerable in this volume. Seriously, the first volume did the series no good. It would have been a lot better if the first couple of chapters of this volume were in the first volume instead. That way, readers would not be left hanging with such a bad impression of MC. The worldbuilding in this volume is outstanding. Reading it feels like the first time picking up Made in Abyss. Everything is alien, and I’ve got a real sense of adventure. It’s great. MC gains a sidekick NPC that explains everything, and the isekai narrative crutch really shines here. We don’t know shit about the world, and neither does MC, so getting things explained that should be common sense in-universe feels completely natural.

    <The Water Magician>: Arc 1 Volume 5 - Oh boy… since I’ve read the last volume, the anime aired, and in it, the banter between MC and sidekicks wasn’t nearly as bad as in the books. I’m pretty sure now that the translation is the problem here, and the anime most likely was translated by someone else. So that’s the first point that annoys me. The second point is the usual goody-two-shoes MC. Explanation will be behind a spoiler tag.

    spoiler

    So, MC is has a couple of kids that he teaches magic to. War breaks out in the neighbouring country, and the kids get abducted. MC is then told he isn’t allowed to join the war efforts, and he jumps through some hoops to enter the war zone and rescue the kids anyway. When he finally rescues the kids, he learns that they have basically been tortured, and he gets really angry. Understandable. They’re his disciples, and the youngest one is just 10. Sidekicks around him mention how they have never seen him that angry, and that even they get scared. Instead of going home with the now rescued kids, MC joins the war effort in earnest in order to get revenge on the mage who tortured the kids. There is a lot of buildup about how angry he is and what he will do to the guy when he finds him. This brings us to the showdown. He freezes the 1000 soldiers that protect the mage, proceeds to overpower him to the point of mana exhaustion (which comes with a migraine), and then tells him more or less “and that’s how those kids have felt!”. He then leaves with the mage, just having a migraine and the 1000 invading soldiers thawing in a couple of hours (it’s magic, so they will all live, don’t ask me). It’s no secret that I hate milktoast MCs, but if they’re consistent, I can deal with that. But why is there half the volume of buildup about MC acting hyper-focused on revenge when he then just has a friendly sparring match at the end. It’s like the T-1000 just booping John Connor’s nose at the end of Terminator 2 before happily skipping home.

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