This Company Wants to Replace Translators

[@machodgdon]

I know Crunchyroll was salivating when they heard this news

[@conradojavier7547]

They're begging Daddy Sony to buy Orange.

[@KingLAO2964]

Man, AI really is about to shake everything up

[@Its_LMP]

Another day, another company looking to cut the cost of paying for translators/eliminate them entirely with the use of AI in the worst possible way...

[@nocturnalanimal6815]

whats crazy is they already pay translators fucking pennies

[@BoujeeItadori]

Ai can be a tool, not a replacement. Perfect way of putting it.

[@barthol9776]

Genius idea, Hire more translators but for less money Orangebros... We are cooking

[@6zaab001]

well its their fault for attacking the fans on top fucking up and maybe if the other translators had said that we don't stand by this statement their would be more good will.

[@seaglass3034]

Ai can be a tool, not a replacement-- unless you're among the localization scene, and you're explicitly acting in bad faith. In which case, my sympathy is '0'. On the flipside of the coin, are people in western businesses who aren't QCing the efforts of the bad actors, and it's the honest, hardworking localization teams that will truly suffer. The bad actors and those who enable them - tacitly, or otherwise - have brought us to this. What a shitty cocktail.

[@davidlewis6728]

the AI will create competition that establishes a skill-floor. localizers will either do their job and produce something of higher quality than the AI, or they will be replaced. there really are no downsides, even if you think the culture war stuff isn't going on.

[@dragongus9574]

I personally don’t really like AI but feel like it’s inevitable and will take most if not all jobs because it would be less people to manage/pay. Another thing is AI can be made to learn from itself and change itself and that would make AI grow exponentially.

[@aaronyang64dragonproductio88]

Well at the end of the day AI is just a tool 🔧 tho

[@caper7635]

I thought we all agreed to leave the Annoying Orange in the past. From the way their 3-step model presents, it almost sounds like the MTL is meant to cut the middle man, and the native speakers are simply meant to work with the MTL as a base, making it sound more sense from the translated language’s perspective without addressing the original Japanese text. This would theoretically speed up production if true, but basically all of the problems you talk about are still there: what the fuck are the native speakers gonna do when the machine makes incomplete nonsense? At that point it’s an even LESS accurate translation to the original text compared to the “woke translators” some of these Orange supporters hate so much.

[@vewvew7138]

Aight, gonna lose my job. It was nice while it lasted.

[@CaffeinatedRoman]

The guy at 3:35 is REALLY good at translating They should pay him more and give him better working conditions I think

[@RandomVex]

Please stop bullying rich investors, they're just trying to make money like good poeple they are. Also stop saying that they ruin lives, those lives don't matter, only rich poeple matter duh

[@mitchellmillimaki01]

All this just for them to pay translators less 🤦🏼‍♂️

[@TaxXempt]

Great video man

[@szymonrozanski6938]

I think this people never read a novel translated by a machine. Naming specifically the machine translation page.

[@ivanbackfromthecardshop8093]

Ignoring how dumb the culture war stuff is too begin with this litterally doesnt change anything for them lol. The "editors" here have the exact same abillity to mess with stuff.

[@Byakkoya11037]

I won't lie, having seen numerous....certain examples....of bad localization I at a point thought "you know maybe AI translation with human corrections wouldn't be such a bad idea", it'd somehow never once occurred to me how idiotic that sounded considering the presence of human input renders the entire idea redundant and basically acts as a justification to make shit even worse for translators who actually want to do their jobs right but get rushed or stretched thin by numerous jobs (as opposed to just the now dubbed "Localizers" who screw things up on purpose and laugh about it on Twitter, which is part of what helped start this culture war fueled Anti-Localization wave to begin with).

[@hirobhya]

That's the thing though. The man in the suits don't care. The easiest way to improve localization quality is to kick all the idiots who intentionally vandalize the product out of the industry, and hire people that actually did a good job. But this won't happen. Not unless some gigachad with a publishing company under their control PROVE without a shadow of a doubt that doing that would increase reputation and sales. Someone has to take the risk and trailblaze the road. But I doubt anyone is gonna do that. To become a CEO or some 'rich as fuck' fuck requires a certain mindset. A mindset that prioritizes reputation among the higher class (whose only interest lies in profit and the trendy-ness, such as AI) and profits. With the former being higher on the list, since crazy rich investors invests in your "prospects" rather than your actual profits. To put it in short, you have to be out of touch with the common people to become a CEO of a massive company. And being out of touch autimatically makes you incapable of enacting the simplest and best way to solve a problem of "quality".

[@conradojavier7547]

Who knew an Annoying Orange came back as a Savior of the Anime industry.

[@xxsupersayen34xxnoe33]

I'm not on tweeter so this is the first I hear of it. at the beginning for the video, I assumed this whole thing was about translating LN volumes and assumed this was another channel that treat humans is completely irreplaceable for some reasons, but then I realised that this was about manga translation and how completely insanely nonsensical this whole thing was. for context: mangas contain both dialogue and illustrations in a way where they're each completely integrated into the other, both are necessary to fully understand what's happening and modern ai image description is completely unable to do an half decent job with mangas, most companies using machine translation on manga don't even try to connect the visual aspect and just use it solely on the dialogue which lacks too much context to make anything coherent this alone makes post-translation of mangas a joke, and I didn't even get into other issues specific to manga machine translation or that apply to all kinds machine translation which all stack up to create an unusable end product if there's one medium that's no going to be affected by the increasing accuracy of machine translation, it's definitely the manga, only exception being companies attempting to pay their employees less for the same work justifying it by claiming they're only doing post translation

[@Shablowsk]

Another day, another AsarathaHS banger

[@nathankeel6667]

The more translation discourses i see the more i realize people dont understand that Japanese and English are very different languages that dont work with a direct translation and ya there are bad translations re zero light novels and jjk manga 2 series I enjoy with translators that mess up important details and as someone who sees AI's potential as a tool. I dont want ai to take over because not only will mistraltions still happen the text will be fucking boring

[@kyperactive]

? So text has to be exciting to be good?

[@Forsen807]

​@@kyperactive Nobody said that

[@kyperactive]

@@Forsen807 "otherwise the text will be boring"

[@nathankeel6667]

@kyperactive my point was a direct translation misses alot of the flavor that character that text is intended to have look at something fe echoes the translation isn't 1 to 1 but adds alot of intended character instead of text book diologe. As someone who took Japanese from 8th to 11th grade sentence structure between Japanese and English are very different were even if you rearrange to fit English it's still doesn't make sense very. Humor is also a issue there's a reason dubs like kaguya and konosuba change things even sub isn't fully 1:1. If you let AI translate something without localization assuming perfection you would still not get original intent or meaning. That's what I mean by boring bland diologe that is devoid of character

[@suetamsuetam1328]

Caleb's gonna be homeless

[@Joenah5]

People who whine about "woke" localizations annoy me so much. Pushing aside how that buzzword is meaningless (more often than not being used to complain about the existence of women or minorities), you just know that they don't recognize the roll good localization plays in so many things (because as with quite a few things in these forms of art, like editing or sound design for example, good technique is often invisible).

[@belldrop7365]

The real answer that even capitalism will agree on, is to release two versions. One is raw MTL with no editing or QC whatsover. Another is a full localization rewrite that's barely recognizable from the original. Capitalism gets to sell two versions at once like pokemon, both sides of the argument gets their worse nightmares. Win:win. No middle ground, it doesn't exist as it's too good to be true.

[@Vraptor1]

Why? Localization is a necessity for translating any work in a proper format for a foreign audience. It’s why King Kong and Spider-Man got to be so popular in Japan, even when some changes were made, especially when it came to their own adaptations of those iconic characters. GTA 5 was hella censored in Japan, removing whole missions, dialogue, models, and textures that didn’t comply with Japanese regulations concerning video games. And do I have a problem with this? No, not really. It’s an inevitability of translating one piece of art to be accessible to a different culture that isn’t familiar with the tone and style of media that say America consumes. That’s why even if GTA 5 wasn’t really localized and a lot of the original North American release was left intact, I imagine the Japanese audience would actually have a far lesser experience as the story, it’s beats, and especially its writing and characters rely on the player having an understanding or experience with American Culture, the music, the foods, the media, and the way advertising and politics are sold to you. Not to mention gang and criminal life that isn’t entirely familiar to those without easy access to guns, like Japan. It’s a localizers job to take GTA 5, it’s satire and reimagining of the American way of life, and change it in ways that make it easier to digest for a Japanese audience. And this isn’t a bad thing, because if done well it allows the player to more closely understand and appreciate the themes and messages the original game had, even if they themselves didn’t understand a single thing about America or American culture or media. It’s why I don’t understand the antagonism towards localization as an inferior version, because much like emulation, it’s often the best way for otherwise inaccessible works to be brought to the attention of a wider audience. Is it always perfect? No, but it’s the reason why people can enjoy the art produced by people around the world, without having to quite literally learn a whole new language of slang, euphemisms, religious iconography, cultural taboos, etc.

[@belldrop7365]

@@Vraptor1 Yes spider man localized for japan was an awesome emissary of hell. On the other hand, western riceballs are doughnuts.

[@SammyRobinson62232]

Also wouldn’t this just make a lot of manga just sound the same and sound very robotic. Along with not being able to solve the culture gap

[@masterkek4243]

I bet you he is right, but also I bet you there will be a big machine translation company in the future with more access to the technology that will make their company successful. They are just too early is all.

[@monkeytails1437]

You’ve always got good politics. Anime fans are very politically incoherent like most fandoms. So thanks for making videos like these to educate weebs who will listen lol

[@SammyRobinson62232]

I literally just try to watch more videos about this and the comment section was “ I trust Ai due to it not pushing an agenda” 🤓

[@Byakkoya11037]

@@SammyRobinson62232 While I can see where those types are coming from, having seen just what many of them consider to be "agenda pushing", a lot of the outrage really is just that. Outrage. Just people getting super angry about things and taking a hard stance on something because they assume the worst.

[@TheVodkaHaze]

As someone who is learning Japanese and has compared AI translations to official translations, I think something people forget is Japanese is very contextual. Like they just won't use pronouns if a sentence can be understood without them, but good luck having a machine pick up on who they're referring to.

[@blazearmoru]

I watched a translation take 6 months to translate via humans, only for the editting and proof reading to take an additional 2 years. At this point, if the JP can make the product from scratch faster than the localizers can localize... maybe they should self delete :|

[@ihaveakirbyobessesion2617]

the thumbnail? 😭

[@voidlooksback]

We're getting mass produced higher quality machine translations that will most likely disregard the actual context or possible wordplay of the original Japanese for shitty localisation aren't week. I hate localisation discourse, genuinely one of the dumbest things I've ever seen.

[@themelancholyofgay3543]

MTL already exists lolll

[@Kaptime]

Wild you'd doubt the feasibility after being a RZ fan and seeing WCT essentially pioneer this approach over the last 2 years.

[@AsarathaHSYT]

WCT is not releasing 500 volumes of content a month. The entire criticism is about the scalability of the operation. Please watch the video next time. Also, some WCT translators I know are not fans of MTL to begin with.

[@myfishisfish3007]

F em fr fr time for them to lose their jobs!!!!!!!!! Ai will not improve translation just like the localizers wont add political BS fair trade!