Discussion Ways to improve MTL (google translate)?

Hey,

Recently I was lucky to read in the discord of cardboard translation by a random user, that its not always the best way to MTL stuff directly from Japanese to English. He recommended translating it to Russian first and then to English, since this would give way better results.
I try to avoid reading with translation tools, but sometimes i still do since there aren't many novels I really enjoy. So I wanted to ask if anyone can confirm this hint (MTL: Japanese-> Russian -> English)? If it's really better, does it work with Chinese and Korean as well? And are there other tips or methods compared to translating Asian novels strait up with google translate? Is the translation tool "Baidu" better for Asian languages then "Google"?

 

If you've watched Fine bros videos on bilingual people vs. google translate, they show you how inaccurate machine translations can be and that's because colloquialisms vary from language to language. When you translate from one language to another language, certain meanings are lost, instead we try to preserve them by finding the closest match to it. Translating from that further to another language would just mean losing more of its original meaning, deviating from the original plot than intentionally planned.

Spoiler: Video

If you want to read MTL (for Chinese novels), I find Baidu to be much more accurate than google translate and if you want to MTL for translation, do try something that breaks down each word or phrase or sentence to be able to grasp the accurate meaning of the story. Eg. Mdbg.net

 

The way Google translate works, the more articles, documents, novels, etc that exist in different languages the best it would translate. Or at least the last time I heard it worked searching over internet for sentences in texts that were in different languages and the more a phrase was repeated the more likely that translation was good. Also when ppl use it if they detect an error in a translation they can make suggestions of how it should be translated. Meaning the more novels translated from Japanese to English the better Google translate will translate further works.

 

No, no, no, no.
1- direct traslation Japanese -> english is better than a 2 step translation. Like westeller explained.(take into consideration the original text can have grammar errors or typo and make the traslation even more messed up)
2- as said in the answer 1, it's doesn't work.
3- Like westeller explained. have a glossary to help the translation, then use translation aggregator to edit it.
4- it's the same, maybe baidu have some glossary to make other asian language more readable into chinese but it's will not be any better than GT for english.

 

use mtl as dictionaries
that da way to improve mtl translation
or multiple mtl then reconstruct it

imo google translate similar with big dictionary

 

like many have said, doing multiple translations doesn't work well because you're translating the mistakes that google translate makes and then google translating tries to fixes these mistakes in the second translation so "it reads better"
but it's completely wrong

you just have to read it with knowledge that google translates have several errors because of htl
i have mentioned some of these many times on this forum
the very first one is immortal = fairy
there are no fairies in chinese mythology but htl decided to call female immortals "fairies" so anything xian = fairy.
for example, xian jie (immortal world) = fairy land....

monk = slut... (don't ask me why)

there are also many pronouns for females that were used in olden times that google translates into prostitute...

also most of the words/terms that contain the word (heaven/sky) will become scorpion....
there are also many words that become cockroach.....

the term "master" , "owner" and "lord" are also all messed up most of the time
fyi, lord is used by subordinates and is kinda like how you'd address your boss
owner is usually used by slaves or servants to refer to their master
master is used to address people like doctors, priests,alchemists..ect or with a certain skillset and also martial arts teachers

and google translate just crashes when you have too many "terms" (for example, names of weapons) in one sentence


it's also sometimes hard to differentiate if the character is male or female because while there are different pronouns for genders (like him/her) in chinese, authors only only "him" (it's not right but nobody really cares unless you're taking a language exam) so the mtl often mixes up him/her while it's trying to translate something that has a feminine "term" in the sentence

also many htl decided that certain "terms" mean certain thing

for example, i've seen many htl translate anything related to hongmen or gu = primeval

it's wrong but htl don't care and readers want consistency so they rather read the wrong things than be corrected

 

for jp wn with simple sentence structure, maybe its feasible but i highly doubt its accuracy

im translating a wn with a fairly incomprehensible mtl for the most part, or even downright wrong sometimes
(some kanji have different meanings and certain authors sometimes use irregular usage for kanji, not to mention puns or wordplay)

so, for your 2step method, i would advise against it because as the others above said, it would be chock full of error

btw, im using translation agrregator. tho for the most part, i refer to mecab, jparser and jdic

 

I kinda tried using all the services and all of them suck. I mean, the Google translation is way better than others(though bing sometimes give good results) but overall it's sucks.
You can't even start to comprehend what the content of story.
I tried those methods by translating to Chinese and then to English, the results are the same.
Then I checked how to the Google translator works and lost all the hope.

Then I came to conclusion that the translation service are not that much of the level to translate novels and its not gonna get better for next 10 years.
So you gonna be thinking "well then, I'm gonna learn Japanese and read the novels" = ha good luck with that.

 

If you want to mtl, always break word to word, and know the language you want to translate into pretty well

 

Sorry if I’m being slightly off-topic, but is there an easy way to use Baidu translator on a phone?

With Google or Bing I can usually just copy/paste a link into the field box, and then they give me a link to the translated-webpage. With baidu, this method doesn’t seem to work...

I’m required to copy/paste individual passages and translate them one-at-a-time, which is inconvenient (since a lot of sites seem to disable copying text, and copy/pasting specific passages on a phone is just a hassle in general.

 

@Westeller yeah, but I mean on phone/mobile. That screenshot looks like the desktop version?

EDIT: Derp, derp, I forgot I could request to see ‘Desktop Mode’ on phone. Well, thanks!

 

Thanks for all the answers.

When i first started to use a translation tool to translate “My wife is a beautiful CEO” i noticed that the translation Chinese-English is way better then Chinese-German so i did go with English instead (I guess because there is more interest in the English version in general). I also had my doubts regarding the two-way translation over Russian ( i know all the fun games with taking a sentence 30x through google translate and guess what it was meant to say at the beginning) but I thought, maybe Russian has something in common with Japanese/Chinese, that the software could use to give better results, even if some other stuff get lost thanks to the two-way translation. But i guess that’s not the case then.

If i summarize everything what you said i end with: Translation over Russian sucks even more, all translation tool suck and will suck for quite a long time in the future as well, using Baidu may be a bit better for Chinese... but still suck, with a LOT of work you can improve the software a bit for individual novels but its still bad, oh and learning one of the Asian languages also sucks because it’s really hard and you would still miss the other two...
Well... that’s a depressing summary... ^^

 

I just used a romaji converter and get it over with

 

I use rikai-kun/chan/sama to get what each words could mean, but also check google for any word groups I suspect to be idioms and such and translate the sentences that way.

Understanding grammar and sentence structure really makes it possible to form a coherent sentence that's close to the meaning in original language.

It may take a lot longer to understand the text, but at least it will be more accurate than mtl. Knowing how the the original language is used helps understanding the author's word choices too.