Discussion Can you at least attempt to MTL properly?

1st, are you my spirit animal?
2nd, sometimes bad mtl can be an adventure
3rd, some of my favourite series are bad mtl and I’ve mentally lobotomized myself to skim past the really bad bits. It’s an art.

 

Actually, and I might be wrong, but if you start from the very beginning of a translation you can pick up any novel you damn well please. Again, as long as you don't start from where another translator stopped.

 

Yeah, i know there are some who try edits the mtl....and i read them when they are trying to edit it, not simply copy&past GT

 

You just have to fake it 'till you make it.

 

Losing some brain stems while reading seems fun.That way you hoomans can understand aliens too maybe sometime in the future.

 

Ehm... I think this translator/editor lost all credibility when he wrote 5'5"/5'7"... That is like a span of 5 cm...
You write around 5'6"~ in that case. Same with the latter, 5'3"~ ... The tilde marks semblance to the Equation answers in math. 1/3= 0.333~

Imperial have greater error between inches than centimetres. Therefore, you shouldn't pull those sort of 'qualified guesses' because it says around/approximately.


But I think MTL can be well done.

A good example would be Renegade Immortal. Albeit the current translator did from scratch. There wasn't TOO many differences to my knowledge from the MTL chapters and the properly translated ones. Void did a great work in that aspect. There was a few terminologies that he didn't translate to English because he didn't know how to translate it but that the current translator chose to translate. Hence those differences together with potential names that might be read differently depending on the person. Since some names are akin to nicknames in Chinese but isn't translated by some, translated by some.

But ye, Renegade Immortal is my only direct connection to a good MTL in reference to the current TL version of the translation covering the same chapters.

 

Don’t just stop at bad MTL. Bad translations in general are a fucking travesty.

True, machine translators owe us readers nothing. But take pride in and ownership of your work goddamn it.

When you put out a bad translation, you are doing a disservice to the author, to the novel, and to yourself.

I don’t expect everyone to reach professional standards, but is it too much to ask to at least get the title right?

 

I think it's hard when you don't know any of the languages and tried to MTL it.

 

honestly i do not understand why people are complaining about MTL.
MTL basically means what you are reading is from google translate, bablefish or similar things.

if you want edited MTL, don't read MTL, because thats not what MTL is.


WN however is confusing because all of teh translators and editors on WN act as if they graduated from harvard or oxbridge with an english major.

they talk so much about how difficult the test they have to do for qidian to "hire" them and then the stuff we get are not better than MTL most of the time........

 

You must have misunderstood something. No one ever said we wanted better "edited MTLs", but better MTL translation quality. MTL doesn't have to be edited Google Translate, but use machine assistance to look up words and phrases in order to piece together a sentence. However, this requires a BASIC and SOLID FOUNDATION in the language, thus me creating this thread in hope that new upcoming translators first build a foundation, before trying to build the house.

 

oh...i understand this...

lnmtl does it best to give you readable mtl with numerous terms submitted from the community and it isn't that bad, but it is also extremely difficult to get wrong terms removed if one is ever submitted.

comrademao on the other hand, does not have a large community that submit terms and you have to wait for the few people to submit terms. sadly, this only applies to novels that these people read.

you can look at the korean novels that CM has which are ridiculously hard to read because very few people submit terms for KR novels...
it is strange but i guess it is easier to use baidu/google to check the meaning of cn words vs korean words i guess?

unfortunately, all of the people at comrademao who approve and suggest terms do not understand CN, but they claim to be "MTL EXPERTS"..........so there are some mistakes....that they refuse to change...

but for some weird reason, the mtl of novels at CM is more or less at the same quality as lnmtl

 

I think it sounds better like this;
The Failed Potion was Soy Sauce so I decided to Cook
Doing MTL is extremely hard especially when you don't know much Japanese. Getting the names wrong is one of the common mistakes in MTL that's why I rarely read MTL unless the story to too good to be miss.

 

I agree, you think people will at least do better than copypasta from Google Translate ==
And to have the face to post it out

 

as long as for yourself then no problem
if it for other~ now that lay the rub~
wait~ is lie or lay? I forget the correct grammar lul~

 

who knows maybe in a year or two we will have artificial neural network on translation and it'll surely create competitors for you guys and Traditional Translation job might rendered obsolete. Imagine ANN with 5% margin of error that would be scary. It is possible but only small portion of tech businesses focus on Language Translation since they believe its not scalable since the market is small.YET. So y'all better pray that it doesn't come out tomorrow or it'll be face slapping time lmao.

 

Maybe it's just me, but if you have 0 understanding of the source language, and don't at least edit the MTL you get from google (or wherever), why bother "translating" in the first place when anyone that wants to read it gets the exact same thing out of it by just having google translate the page for them?

At that point you're just copy+pasting. I don't understand.

 

Maybe I'm just not looking in the right (or wrong) places, but I've never come across wholesale google TL copypasting. There's usually at least some modicum of editing.

Obviously, the issue is the quality and thoroughness of that editing.

 

I hope this happens. Then, I can read any novel I want without having to read the raws. I can just read the English yay!

 

>"She had a moderately long black shortcut"

That's not a grammar mistake buddy.

 

The way I understand it, things like Google Translate already are ANNs. That's why they are vulnerable to political activists mistraining them.
They're limited in quality because they still don't have the slightest idea what the text actually means.

I would like to argue that sufficiently bad translations are actually harmful, as they promote misunderstandings and cause neural cell genocide.

In "I was a sword when I reincarnated" WN translation, there is a period of unusually unreadable translation, probably the one made by Comet Translations (I can't access their site now, probably they took it down entirely). I don't think it's possible to get there by using any kind of editing.