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lokeloski
@lokeloski
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amydentata
@amydentata

Machine translation can only really work as a first draft that is then reviewed by at least one human who knows the language. You can tell when translations and captions are done by machine only, because they suck!


lokeloski
@lokeloski
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Inumo
@Inumo

Seconding this, there's a hefty amount of anecdotal evidence that shows "let the machine make an approximate draft and then proofread with a human" is way less effective than just starting from scratch across multiple fields. Transcripts have inconsistent style & can lead your brain to skip over stutters or blips in what someone actually said, translations misunderstand dialectical turns of phrase, I even remember making fansubs for a YouTube video I liked once and going, "I wish I could just start from scratch, because having to adjust all these display timings and delete these not-quite-right lines from these machine-generated subs is way more effort."

Machine work is, and likely always will be, a "good enough" approximation. If you want it to be quality, however, you gotta pay the extra for fully-human work, so you aren't stuck trying to shore up a house on sand.


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in reply to @lokeloski's post:

That explains the weird wording that shows up, but it overall seems too good for that, if a bit boring? A friend has been streaming it and a lot of the team seems to be from English speaking countries according to their site map. Maybe the early game got more attention or something.

in reply to @lokeloski's post:

backing up MTPE is way worse than starting from scratch, even editing a real janky human translated script is way more consistent and comprehensible.

Even the best mtl I've seen is really dry and sucks the life out of a script.

Can confirm, the only way machine translation actually helps is when a company has trained it with its own documents to translate similar documents. Even then, you need a couple of people to go over it, because the machine is stubborn and sometimes refuses to use the terms the company prefers.
To just feed a game to a machine and use whatever it churns out is just greed and disregard for your customers.

I was thinking the only way a machine translation with a human reviewer would be functional to cover all the constant errors, wrong translations, and inconsistencies machine translations have would be someone: 1. fluent enough in both languages to just translate it, 2. familliar with the material inside and out enough to spot and fix issues, 3. willing to trudge through a book's worth of terrible grammar and rewrite all of it.

At that point just hire someone to translate...

This gets at a core problem that I've started talking about: The issue isn't "how good" the AI tools are at all, and arguing about "how close we are" plays right into the idea that this is an ultra-valuable market. The problem is that, even if it's technically perfect, the software is by definition never going to care about the result and its suitability for the purpose.

If you want to be more precise about it, the problem is fundamental to how large language models work. You can't just feed them an arbitrary metric to judge their output by; they have to work with the metric that was programmed into them at the outset, which is always how closely that output resembles the relevant parts of the corpus. That this is a problem should become apparent the moment you apply this tech to anything that diverges significantly from the corpus, but even if it doesn't, the fact that the text you're working with isn't part of the corpus (why bother translating something the machine's already worked with?) means there's always going to be room for error.

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