Why do people who think they can translate with machine translation exist?

Will NU question them or take them off the listing?

 

Lol alright

 

Just curious, which of those two series could they be?

The grammar of this question, is a making me a little confused.
- Is this a question about what people think about MTL groups?
- Is this a question about a supposition, that people appreciate MTL groups?
- Is this a question about why groups post MTL projects?

But this follow up, leads me to infer your ire for MTL.

So in order to try to understand your prose, I overthought your post. Now in the conjecture of why do MTL groups post machine translated work. The reasons are numerous, but profit or self-satisfaction are high, in my opinion.

Profit off of easy work, basically take raws, run it through a machine and poof there's a translation in a target language. Now they can get ad revenue or donations. Not all audiences can read English fluently, so some people may believe this is a good translation.

Self-satisfaction, some webmasters have really thick skin and will post what they want and wish.

 

A MTL is copy pasted into a machine and then dumped to a web page. You can do that yourself with copy and paste. It's 5 minutes of time, if that. People who do unedited MTL are scum that ruin series.

Even edited MTL are frustrating, more so as they're often "edited" by people who don't even speak English as their first language or fluently (as shown by their comments) and the copy paster isn't a fluent speaker either. It's the blind leading the blind. (And the commentors adore them for it for some reason, my only thinking is their English is also poor so having anything that they can read at all is fine and they can't see the bad grammar anyway.)

Magi’s Grandson and I Was a Sword When I Reincarnated.

 

@Westeller Thanks for all the info! How do we report things? I'm trying to take down some dead links D:

 

>Novel Update's homepage
>Your profile

>Report problem

>Fill in the detail. It's a plus if you include the link in the report

 

@Westeller So can we get that group banned from the site then? I don't want it to look like there are updates for that series.

 

Why do Mtl groups exist?
Because there is a demand for MTL. MTL can be done with less skill, saves time, no quality issue. Most people who read MTL have already lost their brain cells. Also, beginners have to start somewhere, 'Rainbowturtle'.

 

First things first, people that MTL and then properly edit the novel are generally pretty appreciated, they spend a lot of time (generally a lot more than people with actual grasp of the language) in translating, and the final result tends to be reasonably accurate.

Secondly, if you think the novel wasn't edited, I suggest reporting it, as MTL is only accepted by NU if it was edited. Straight copy-paste from Google Translate is not accepted.

... If the novel was edited and it's still terrible though, then there is nothing you can do about it.

 

Thank you!!! ^-^

 

Not sure if this has been said or not, but if you think they regurgitate the content of a machine without proofreading, make a report to the mods. There's a report button in your NU profile (not NUF profile). The moderator in charge will have a look at it and try to make sense. If it's complete nonsense, then sure, it will be banned.

@runsing wanna take a look at this?

p/s: It's pretty terrible, wtf does this sentence in I Was A Sword When I Reincarnated, "We saw that figure getting the heart." even supposed to mean? Heck, Ai-chan ran it on google translate just to see if the 'translator' got it from GT and was totally baffled. Even google translate is more accurate than this translator.

 

err.. if from your own test, GT is better, then why are ppl claiming/implying this is MTL copy-paste?

 

Maybe the person is using a different translation machine, such as systran or bing? Ai-chan has only compared it with google translate. But if even machine translation is better, you have to seriously wonder about the quality of the translation.

 

Perhaps, this is a problem of third translation.

Japanese --> some language --> English.

Perhaps the 'translator' doesn't 'translate' from the JP RAW. Instead, they were using a translation of another language (I am guessing Vietnamese or Russian).

 

it could be an mtl, it could be the person doing mtl itself is bad at english, or it also simply be a bad product of translation. "a translation of a translation of a translation". it's still a translation nevertheless, just a bad one. (damn, @Yukkuri Oniisan beat me to saying it)

and like 『Totally not a Trap』 has said, NU does not reject bad translation. unless it was proven otherwise. not to mention, we only got 1 report so far, and its not even touching the issue of translation.

perhaps someone from wangmama (WM) could shed light to us on why the chapter on dreampotato has WM watermark , yet absent from WM's site . (i'm guessing they're actually affiliated)

 

But if they can mess up that bad, then wouldn't it have been better to machine translate straight from Japanese to English? There was no 'kokoro' anywhere in that sentence, and Ai-chan guess the 'heart' is supposed to be the translation of 'toushi' (fighting spirit)

It's like they didn't even read their own translation. English proofreaders can't do anything since they don't know the original language it came from. They can only fix the grammar, and that's it. The correct grammar of the wrong translation is still wrong translation. So even with the best of proofreaders, they can only repaint the pottery, but the shape of the pottery is still useless and ugly.

 

is it possible if they (WM) have their own mtl machine :x

 

I think that we need to differentiate between Machine assisted translation which uses dictionaries done by people who are studying the language with a strong grasp of English VS novels like I Said Make My Abilities Average with translators who admit that they suck at English and you have user comments saying thanks for the translation, but I didn't understand anything.
When such works are edited you get fan fiction not a translation