Maybe as a first pass, but I don’t think the current approach to AI models can reliably translate things like this. There is a lot of nuance and details that will be lost in an approach using only AI and the quality would suffer.
Hopefully this means malicious changes to localized media will disappear.
It is understandable that some localization will still be necessary depending on the context (such as something like a very specific geographic/political/cultural joke or remark a person would only understand if they lived in Japan), but recently modern localizers have been taking so many liberties they may as well have created entirely brand new shows and they all suck.
Totally agree, it’s getting worse, especially the shit crunchyroll craps out
Hopefully this means malicious changes to localized media will disappear.
We can hope.
I see that happen more in games than I do in anime. Can you give me an example? I’d rather anime as faithful as possible to be frank.
I would also like anime to be as faithful as possible, but there are examples of anime with translations that are intentionally maliciously changed. Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid being the low hanging fruit here with the infamous “patriarchy” line. People are finding more distasteful changes in other anime localized by Jamie Marchi (and others).
If you mean an example of something like a joke that may not translate properly, puns are commonly the cause of necessitating such changes. But in the case of a joke regarding specific geography, I cannot think of one, but I mention something so specific because there may be a show that has it, and in that case IMO the context of the scene should be taken into consideration, as well as the original author’s intent. If the author wants someone to laugh there, then it would be on the localizer to make sure that scene is funny in the target language. If the joke goes over the heads of its viewers because its something they couldn’t understand I would say its important to defer to the author’s intent of that scene being funny, while ensuring the potential replacement is as analogous or similar in the target language as possible. So a similar joke that is more generic or understandable would be better IMO than a direct 1:1 translation. Of course, this is an edge case and not common, but still a potential.
If i was on my pc atm i could pull up an article with way to many examples, but one off the top of my head is a recent remake of a romcom has a localizer literally saying the show sucked and they fixed it. Can’t think of the name atm. I know a boys love manga called I Think I Turned my Childhood Friend Into A Girl (or something like that) turned a character trans, kinda ruining the point of yaoi. Mushoku tensei apparently got a lot of censorship.
Here’s an article of bad English localizations in games and anime, https://nichegamer.com/8-years-awful-localizations-games-anime
That article was pretty scathing. Some translation choices I understand, but others not so much. The media is Japanese, made for Japanese sensibilities. The people who seek out these games and ACTUALLY BUY THEM do so because they enjoy the cultural experience. There are plenty of western culture experiences if that’s your cup of tea, and if no laws are being broken I say let your wallet decide.
Could you imagine one of these “localizers” getting ahold of the Rance games?
The problem is, will MTL fix that at all? Leaving aside the garbled and incorrect sentences it can produce, Crunchyroll and Funimation and whatnot approved the supposedly maliciously translated lines. I wouldn’t be surprised if they even requested these changes.
Also, the vast majority of translations don’t do this. Should all the other translators give up their jobs to MTL because a few fuck up?
Of course it’s possible it solves nothing. As I said, localizers will not be completely eliminated. There will still be a necessity for them to correct poor grammar and other such things that a translator usually does not do. Really a localizer is basically supposed to be just a slightly more advanced proofreader. And lately many of them have been overstepping their bounds. I just think introduction of LLM and MTL in the process can maybe be more accurate because it hopefully won’t be injecting things where its not originally present.
I doubt Crunchy/Funi are behind the changes because they have also approved accurate translations as well. If it was company mandated then ALL of their localizations would be wildly inaccurate, which is not the case. I think its really just negligence and them just signing off on basically anything.
MTL and LLMs have advanced pretty quickly recently and even MTL from sites like DeepL can be surprisingly accurate with nuance in some sentences, being much more contextually knowledgable than other MTLs like Google Translate. I think if not now then in a few years the accuracy will increase.
DeepL can be surprisingly accurate
Can be, but as someone who uses it a lot, not most of the time, especially not for languages far removed from what you’re trying to translate to, like Japanese. And if you do get something that’s (mostly) accurate, the sentence structure or grammar tends to be awful.
As long as they’re working on it and not implementing it anytime soon, because the tech is definitely not there yet.
I honestly feel bad for deaf people who have to put up with the state of subtitles in all media. There should be some universal standards that all studios should be forced to adhere to.
It’s amazing that there isn’t. Where are the disability rights?
And of course, translated material just adds another layer of complexity. So imagine, an AI has to first capture the proper words being said, then translate it in context and understand obscure references the author might have made, etc… Yeah right… When AI can do that, then we’ll really have artificial “intelligence”.
Until it’s there it still can be used as help. It should be much easier to correct incorrect subtitles than writing them from scratch and putting them at the correct timestamp.
So, seeing this reminded me of an article I read recently in which they talked about this issue with professional translators. I made a post about it here just now for those that are interested in it. It’s a long-form article in which three different professionals are interviewed about it. Check it out!
I already have this with Stremio, I’m not sure it works as expected though.
While some people absolutely need to get fired (entire job types, actually) and straight mtl would probably be better than some of the stuff we’ve seen, this probably isn’t a reason to celebrate (yet anyway). The mangling of translations doesn’t happen as they are being translated, remember seven seas? The translators had no idea their work was being undermined by shitty YA authors.
Crunchyroll have been scum to animators and voice actors, not people who do subtitles. When will it stop?
