Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Manga, Translation, and the Rise of Machines
|
Goto page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
mdo7
 Posts: 8242 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
|
|||
|
I'm not a fan of AI being used to translate manga because we've seen defect and bad/shoddy translation coming out of them. Not only that, we've seen AI being used to create games that are copyright infringement of the original like this one for example. I also want to add that AI is not only being used for that. At the same time, I was listening to a Nature podcast (you know the scientific journal, Nature) last week and I was horrified to find out that there's been scientists and researchers using AI to help write up research papers, very low quality research papers from what I've heard and they're somehow bypassing peer review checks. At the same time, I'm also disturbed that college students are using them to cheat on their academic work like essays, and for purpose that would be deemed academic dishonesty (which BTW, I'm glad you mentioned in your conversation), that has caused some ethic experts to call on regulation on AI and telling college/universities students to please not use AI to cheat or to commit academic dishonesty.
This is why I don't like AI being used to translate manga, or for other nefarious purpose like what I stated above. |
||||
|
||||
Beatdigga
 Posts: 5180 Location: New York |
|
|||
|
Ignoring every other issue with AI, the simple fact is that the technology is not ready. It hallucinates. It translates robotically. There's only so much one can do when the tool itself is beyond imperfect, and for all the cost savings it may promise, it will cost more in the long run to fix the errors. Then you're looking at reputational damage for using imperfect tools and producing subpar results.
https://fortune.com/2025/05/09/klarna-ai-humans-return-on-investment/ Fortune Magazine had a big article about how so many AI projects have failed to deliver, most notably with the company Klarna, which fired a ton of people and went all in on chatbots and other AI tools, only to recently reverse course when efficiency and customer satisfaction plummeted, going back to hiring humans. |
||||
|
||||
Joe Mello
 Posts: 2568 Location: Online Terminal |
|
|||
|
Someone on English-language social media pointed out something really interesting when ZUN (of Touhou fame) said he was going to be using AI to generate backgrounds for his game. ZUN sees gen/predictive AI as a tool and one that he wants to have at least some understanding of, but he and likely the country at-large are not aware of the greater moral and environmental costs.
|
||||
|
||||
|
Puchu
Posts: 59 |
|
|||
|
I'm in the writing/translation work sphere myself, with bosses that were super keen on AI and machine translation, and my takeaway from the various trials we did was:
1. The further apart two languages are in a language pair, the shittier the end result is. 2. The smaller the language is, the shittier the end result is (it's absolutely useless for Finnish, as a random example). 3. AI writing/translation is a little more fluid than regular machine translation, but you also can't actually trust the output, because it will flat out make things up or not be consistent in its choice of words, which is kinda critical when translating fiction. Basically, what you get is at best a mediocre product, and it's not only easier to do it human first than to fix a machine/AI translation, you also get a better end result by doing it human first, because you're less likely to get "stuck" in the translation already given (it's often harder to come up with alternatives when there's already an easy answer given, and changing something in one place often means having to tweak a bunch of surrounding text as well, and it's kinda easy to get "lost"). AI translation is a pretty typical example of "fast, cheap and good; pick two". Honestly, the only thing I'd trust it to translate for anime is episode summaries. Y'know, those little blurbs on streaming sites nobody actually reads? Yeah, those. It's also baffling to me that all the CEOs salivating over AI technology don't seem to grasp that the prices are currently kept artificially (heh) low due to venture capital, and some day, they're gonna have to pay the actual price. And if they've made their business dependant on AI, there's no reason for the providers to stop cranking up the price (I mean, just look at Adobe prices). Not to mention that we're already heading pretty rapidly towards a global energy crisis, and with the amount of power AI requires to run, that's also likely to become an issue. |
||||
|
||||
Greed1914
 Posts: 5389 |
|
|||
|
I suppose that the reason that "AI" disturbs me more than things like block chains or NFTs is just how hard companies are pushing it. Those other things may have gotten some interest out of companies like Ubisoft, for example, but it wasn't all that widespread, and the predictable bottom falling out happened pretty quickly. On the other hand, we have this push to use "AI" for...something, even if there isn't a goal served or it actively works against their own business models. Google's main source of revenue is still advertising, but it seemingly has no problem with using Gemini to skim those advertisers' sites and keep you from going to those sites. At some point, those advertisers might decide that it's a waste of money.
An awful lot of them seem more concerned about being either the first at it or just having it at all than what it means going forward. |
||||
|
||||
|
Hatless
Posts: 39 |
|
|||
|
AI isn't a glowing holographic brain controlled by Cyberdyne. It's software. You can run it on your desktop.
Putting this much effort into panicking about it is silly. |
||||
|
||||
Zen119
 Posts: 88 Location: Illinois,USA |
|
|||
|
All I want to say to those who do translations is just do good translations and don’t put unnecessary stuff to what you are translating so people won’t be advocating for AI translations.
|
||||
|
||||
|
Joe Mello
Posts: 2568 Location: Online Terminal |
|
|||
You'd be surprised at how much stuff you crammed into just this one phrase. |
||||
|
||||
FishLion
 Crazy Fangirl Posts: 861 |
|
|||
|
I hated to see that advertorial but I don't presume that the writers have control over the advertisements that appear. My big worry is that it somehow came from above and warned about a softening on AI and I am glad to see y'all immediately discuss it to call out it's problems.
I am also really tired of this, sometimes it seems like "AI translation" means the program asks google to use Google translate and the end result is 1% better or something. It reads as flatly as google translate but just isn't as prone to nonsense sentences. That's technically an improvement but it is still so far from the nuance and subtleties of language I don't see how people will ever pay to use it without a professional hand unless the fan translation is nonexistent or completely trash. The Venn Diagram of titles that aren't given a better fan translation and have a foreign audience has gotta be really small, lord knows I have more than enough fan translations of unimported works and official translations of works that even if I didn't hate AI on principle I would be hard pressed to consume something of such low quality. I really feel like if venture capitalists hadn't had the genius idea to call an upgraded chat bot "AI" then no one would care at all, it is really just a fancy word for machine learning which does have it's uses but none of the glittery promises the term AI implies. It's just a user friendly interface for machine learning search databases, that probably wouldn't attract all the money though. hence fancy words. My biggest concern is that they are trying to get translations companies to rely on it and then they will start laying off people who do the actual work and they will have to pull a Klarna, but only after derailing these people's lives and the career that powers our hobby.
People really think it's magic. I know people personally that enjoy the content they produce and are still on the "but AI is still learning! It will get more efficient and correct" stage of the conversation. Business types who wants to leverage tech in every way they can and don't understand the tech are some of the most susceptible to the shiny lies the AI industry is spreading. Maybe when they realize their "personal AI marketing team" is just a slightly upgraded version of google's targeted ads that also didn't magically make customers appear in droves they will realize they've been had. If not when the subsidizing stops and the company charges the actual cost they definitely won't find it worthwhile. For now though I expect people who consume the internet non-critically to continue liking AI until they learn better or it actually charges it's cost, too many people take things at face value. |
||||
|
||||
Daiz_
 Posts: 163 |
|
|||
That is indeed the case! To reference a post of mine from the talkback thread on the emaqi advertorial, most "AI translation", including what Orange is currently doing, is known as machine translation post-editing (MTPE). MTPE has been around long before the current crop of "AI" technology, and there are two commons things to know about MTPE: 1. It is loved by publishers and localization agencies who don't care much for quality and want to just put something out for as low of a price as possible. 2. It is almost universally reviled by professional translators, because as mentioned in the article, it generally takes longer to work with (because if you want good results you will be basically reworking the whole thing), produces worse results than translating from scratch (because it's easy to get your translation brain jammed and distracted by the initial poor machine translation), and then as the cherry on top it basically always pays less because the company will pretend the whole process is just "editing", not translating. However, one thing to keep in mind is that just because MTPE is bad, doesn't mean all computer assistance in translation in bad. There are a lot of plenty useful tools and concepts (like translation memory) that genuinely help translators and makes their life more efficient, and there are certainly going to be ways in which machine learning (the technology underneath all AI) could be used to make the life of translators easier. But MTPE really isn't one of them. To sum it up, if you are an English language consumer of Japanese media, you should want the English localization of Japanese media to be made by actual human professionals who are fairly compensated for their efforts. It is directly connected to the quality of all of your experiences and thus your overall enjoyment of this shared passion of ours. |
||||
|
||||
|
FishLion
Crazy Fangirl Posts: 861 |
|
|||
That's funny honestly, we all know the dream some people have of AI translating around things they dislike is never going to happen. Some people are just so ridiculously brainwashed that they will accept a lower quality product if it preserves their safe space. If companies want to make slop to sell to people who like that stuff and the same people are going to be revising the scripts, doesn't that make it more likely that companies will add more stuff and not less? Sorry guys, if you want an alternative to the official translation that has any degree of quality then it is going to be made by fan translation groups (like it already is) or the same people that translated before with the same rubber stamp by the same companies whose translation decisions people complain about. In other words, the only way someone gets a translation untouched by "unnecessary stuff" is to read it directly after machine translation without waiting for the publisher to add stuff, at which point they aren't paying anyway and why would companies care to cater to them then? People can enjoy there slightly improved machine translation all they want, but that is just going to further drive home the point to producers that they are no longer their target audience and people will ignore their preferred style of translation more and more. If it gets them to stop whining about translation changes on ANN then more power to them, I have a feeling companies will not lose out on many sales from the crowd that is extremely demanding and complains about everything they publish. My bigger concern is companies messing up people's lives for a poor product and how many people will be harmed before reversing course, but that is just companies being companies and not really related to all the petty people getting schadenfreude from people being hurt because they disagree with creative decisions. |
||||
|
||||
FireChick
Subscriber Posts: 2775 Location: United States |
|
|||
|
I hate that companies are pushing hard to use AI translation for manga when there's nothing AI can do to make its translations...well, human. Like Jocelyne Allen said, it can't convey things like idiom, metaphor, nuance, and so on. I just read a manga adaptation of Night On The Galactic Railroad put out by Tuttle, and the manga itself is nice, but not only is the translation quality awful, but whole speech bubbles are left completely blank! And unfortunately, other manga published by Tuttle are being subject to the same treatment.
And yeah, Titan Comics made a horrible first impression with how badly they botched their Kamen Rider Kuuga release...and yet somehow they're licensing a ton of manga like hotcakes. Plus, all of their manga list Motoko Tamamuro and Jonathan Clements as translators, but have the two people in question ever mentioned anything about going into translating manga before? It wouldn't surprise me if Titan just slapped their names on the back just so they can claim they used human translators and lie about continuing to machine translation. |
||||
|
||||
|
ThrowMeOut
Posts: 290 |
|
|||
|
I'll never forget the time Crunchyroll tried to use AI translation on a show and it translated "you're burning the food" to "what you are doing is a carcinogen." It's technically correct, but no one would ever say that.
And there's always those weirdos who are terrified human translators are going to add WOKENESS to the translations even though that's happened, what, four times? And was rectified each time when pointed out? No better to have wildly inaccurate machine translation that constantly gets confused by Japanese names. |
||||
|
||||
|
TsarPlatinum
Posts: 70 |
|
|||
It's really fascinating seeing people just openly resort to infantilizing Japan and orientalism to justify why other people may disagree with them. I've noticed a lot of Japanese YouTubers I watch started using the new AI dubbing feature on YouTube which now translates their videos into English and dubs over them so more people can watch and understand them. I think that's a nice feature and helps their content get more exposure and enjoyed by a larger number of people. I can understand why anti-AI people are stressing though. It must feel like the walls are closing in on them and it becomes more and more apparent this is not a battle they're going to win. The narrative against AI completely fell apart the second they put an AI James Earl Jones in Fortnite and everyone loved it and it became one of their most successful events. |
||||
|
||||
|
Joe Mello
Posts: 2568 Location: Online Terminal |
|
|||
I'm not sure how saying Japan may think of AI in a different context than us "infantilizes" them. |
||||
|
||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group