highimpactsex

blogger and game dev

no more social media. i make text games that are poorly rated in game jams and talk about cool niche stuff.


not gonna lie, i’m always frustrated when the clicks are going to people who are writing about non-english language media through the wonderful tool of machine translation.

part of it is that i’m in the field, but the bigger one is this is how misinformation about non-english media spreads. a machine doesn’t understand cultural contexts; all it can do is data in and data out. machines have their place (well, they’re more like solutions searching for a problem at the moment), but they’re definitely not the main tool people should use to write about non-english cultures.

i just find this shit disrespectful. it’s reprehensible it keeps happening and people are okay with it lol. it’s obviously chasing clout because you’re “informing” the public about non-english language media and carving out a niche — but instead, you’re burying the people who actually know their stuff and likely misinforming the public about everything through your clumsy usage of machine translation.

bonus:


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in reply to @highimpactsex's post:

I mean, virtually none of the games press outlets employ dedicated or even tertiary translation staff anymore, and that includes certain sites that advertise themselves as specialising in [language xyz]-centric news... many of these outlets are currently posting big ol thinkies about AI without acknowledging that they've essentially already ceded to it, and quite happily at that, via an overreliance on machine translation (if they admit to using it at all)

so in that sense, I'm quietly grateful to the enthusiast knuckleheads that wear their idiocy on their sleeves because it means I can safely ignore them; it's the people using and abusing it completely undeclared that really bug me, especially because it's most detrimental to the people least equipped to recognize when it's being used

I think I know who you mean... I tuned them out long ago, so I'm more than willing to defer to you, but I always felt they were transparently bumbling through things with Google Translate

the silver lining to seeing buzz around these self-appointed authorities is that any amount of genuine familiarity or insight is enough to dislodge them, should one make that their goal