Forum - View topicDoes the Light Novel Translation Process Need AI?
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Amuro1X
Posts: 278 |
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KEEP AI AND MTL OUT OF TRANSLATION
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Kougeru
 Posts: 5807 |
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Japanese is too hard for "AI". I hate that term because it's not true AI. Anyway, I've never seen any form of AI get Japanese correct enough. I'm known in some circles for being anti-localization. I have disagreements with a lot of choices made in localization but I'm not stupid enough to think AI is any better. I won't deny that least MOST localization gets the general meaning across whereas AI I've seen often output the exact opposite meaning (Though Crunchyroll and Aniplex subtitles have done this as well, but as a result of bad grammar and missing words rather than translation issues). YouTube's forced autodub has already shown at a large scale how awful AI translation is. Maybe someday it can work but right now I'd call it outright dangerous.
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icomeanon6
 SubscriberPosts: 118 |
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Anyone who thinks a machine translation of a book is "good enough" shouldn't be reading books. Books are wasted on them.
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Jabootu
Posts: 418 |
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I've felt from the very start of people debating the use of AI in matters such as this that the people who are just dead set against AI, and there are plenty of them, are making a grave error primarily emphasizing its inferiority to human translations. Yes, that's an obvious and handy cudgel for the present, and presumably some time to come.
However, it's in the nature of AI to get increasingly better at things as time goes along. If you predicate opposition to AI primarily based on its inferiority, that opposition will lose a lot of steam as time passes and the technology improves. I expect it will always be best to have a human editor look over any AI-translated work, but that's true of human-generated translations as well. Again, I'm not defending AI translations per se, just warning that critics probably shouldn't put all their eggs in the "it sucks" basket. |
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FishLion
Crazy Fangirl Posts: 861 |
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If it gets to that point, I will knuckle down and learn Japanese, I might be permissive of an okay translation by humans that misses the mark, but most people accept that because they know that a human tried and did their best even when it's not great. But if publishing companies start feeding their scripts to machines first I could legitimately just use fan translations.
Sure, you can hire a more experienced editor, but overlord ChatGPT has already decided a majority of the sentence structure and tone. They would have to read the original and rewrite the entire thing to capture the magic and soul of the original and at that point why is MTPE necessary at all? Plus, it's stolen, I'm not paying for stolen goods, the number of artists, writers, translators, and creators of every stripe ripped off by these people is hard to fathom. It doesn't matter how hard it is, I would rather give up localization at all than support them if this is the way companies insist on going. |
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jagerlach
Posts: 6 |
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Ascendance of a Bookworm Part 5 Vol 4 doesn't end on a cliffhanger. I assume he meant Part 5 Vol 7.
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Yune Amagiri
 Posts: 1325 Location: France |
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It depends on which AI we are using and how we are using it. If it's a free or trial "AI," which is nothing but glorified MTL, then no. If it's a real AI tool, which always costs a subscription and is often limited to companies and can understand context in a mind-blowing way, then yes. However, on one condition: it always needs to be paired with a human proofreader for many reasons that will differ from person to person. From a purely technical aspect, the only error that a real professional AI in November 2025, when translating Japanese to English with no OCR needed, can still make is a typo in Japanese names because of their numerous interpretations, which depend on the creator.
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FishLion
Crazy Fangirl Posts: 861 |
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Translation has never been math though, that's why famous books often have multiple translations in the same language. The best translation comes when someone reads the source directly without AI inserting preexisting notions into their head so they can properly capture the tone. Having a translator work with an extremely technical translation as a starting point just puts money in the pockets of those subscriptions services and screws over the translators who work they scraped to teach it, when they work it is only by copying the real effort of other works and that's why it's relatively easy to trick AI into reproducing copyrighted content even when they aren't acting like Sora about it. Even if it does okay it's just stolen, I don't see how anyone can watch the publishing company steal from other translators to get their copy and still enjoy the book. |
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mdo7
 Posts: 8230 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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What kind of question and article is this? You want my answer: NO!!!
Why do you need AI for light novel translation process for, are we lacking fluent Japanese to English translators nowadays? |
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invalidname
 Contributor Posts: 2553 Location: Grand Rapids, MI |
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The first part here is important and it’s because when famous books have multiple translations, it’s not just because successive translators were more “right” than their predecessors, but rather because the translations served different purposes. Consider the many translations of Les Miserables. Some took out Hugo’s infamous “digressions” or moved them to appendices, others changed content for their intended audiences, including a pirated version translated during the US Civil War that removed Hugo’s condemnations of slavery for a Confederate audience. Among the modern translations, I like Julia Rose’s version that is aggressively modernized, because Hugo was writing for the common person, not the university egghead. But some readers think she goes too far, so they can go read something like the Christine Donougher translation. Point being: there can’t be one “right” or “best” translation: it’s a process of making value judgements in service of a specific purpose. And AI can’t do that. Plus let’s also take stock of all the things an LLM can’t genuinely understand: cultural references, context, jokes, and puns. Think of the scene in your name. where the girl Mitsuha, in Taki’s male body, refers to herself as “watashi” (a proper/feminine pronoun), to the shock of the boys sitting there. She quickly corrects to “boku”… still not casual enough, before finally getting approval for “ore”. As far as an LLM is concerned, those three words all mean “I”, and it’s unlikely to get the joke or fashion a suitable replacement. Because sometimes a direct translation can’t work and must be replaced entirely. There’s a similar joke in the visual novel Muv-Luv that I recall gave the translation team fits: slacker protagonist Takeru uses the pronoun “omae” (an extremely casual form of “you”) with the fabulously rich girl Meiya, who has been treated as unapproachable royalty her entire life and who comically blisses out (complete with shojo bubbles) to be addressed so informally. Throw that at an LLM and of course, “omae” = “you”, and the joke doesn’t land. For their part, the translation team eventually settled on having Takeru ending his sentence with “, dude”, which is perhaps unnecessarily gendered, but extremely casual, which is what the original joke was going for. Is it the right translation? I don’t know… I laughed, so maybe? Does it land for me because I’m an American and that’s our slang, so maybe it wouldn’t work as well in the UK, Australia, or English-speaking Asia? Also possible! Context matters! Point being, translation is an art, not a science, and it’s a lot more than doing a 1-to-1 mapping of words between lanaguages. And there is little evidence that LLMs can deliver translations that are anything more than functional. For art like anime, manga, and light novels, that ain’t gonna cut it. |
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Low-Angle Nakagawa
Posts: 27 |
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Of course there's a "best" translation. Despite not being perfect, Funimation's translation of One Piece is much better than 4Kids. If you're arguing the 4Kids translation has a purpose (editing the show down for little kids) so it's valid then I don't think you understand what anime fans want out of translations and localizations. You can clearly translate things wrong, or censor things if a translator doesn't like them and wants to try to hide it away. We've had plenty of manga and LNs get revisions because they got caught trying to do that. If AI cant do what you're saying and If AI translations means less/no censorship from human translations then maybe they can be involved in the process. |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 5363 |
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Unfortunately, the parts about speed are why I think it is going to work its way in, even when the people doing the work would rather not. Even if they provide a superior result, someone providing something so much faster is going to eat into sales. I'm not convinced that the problems around Crunchyroll's subtitles at the start of this season would have gotten as much attention if they weren't also late. A lot of people will put up with 'good enough' as long as it's fast.
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Wyvern
 Posts: 1792 |
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"Better" and "best" are two very different concepts. Besides, 4Kids VS Funimation is not really a good example because 4Kids was not attempting to translate One Piece: they were trying to adapt One Piece, creating a more westernized, watered-down show using the original as raw materials. Funimation's goal is to bring the show as it already exists to English speakers. These two projects do not have the same goals. There are many examples in the world of classic literature of works with multiple good-faith translations, and in some cases, experts have argued for decades or even centuries over which translation is superior. If you want to see a bunch of literature professors get into a shouting match that lasts for hours, ask them which of the thirteen (and counting!) separate English translations of Anna Karenina is the best one. There's no definitive answer because translation can't be boiled down to math or formula. There's far too much nuance and subjectivity at play. The complexity of a first-rate translation is something extremely daunting and requires tremendous understanding of culture, language, and art to get just right. You are never going to get the same results by simply feeding text into a glorified chatbot. |
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FishLion
Crazy Fangirl Posts: 861 |
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That is a very good point, besides obvious situations where edges are sanded off for kids, there are pplenty of methodologies and reasonings to translate things the way people do.
I guess these editors could have the script and see what Japanese words are used, then add context, but we have once again arrived at making a bad translation that editors then have to fix. If they have to do that then how is money being saved? I thnk the money saved is hypothetical and it is definitely more work to read a poorly translated script and a Japanese script and compare than just make a translated script. Unless your plan is to not check it as much as you promise.
Did you even read the article? It literally about using a machine translation with an editor to make a final copy. If some company was trying to hide content from you they would just tell he editor to do it. The issue is that it makes a bad translated copy first you have to work around, at no point does this keep the company from having final control over what goes in a book. |
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Hi-Chan
 Posts: 153 Location: Canada |
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No,and when it does i am done buying books.
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