I’m not going to lie, I was a little nervous and kinda hesitant to make this post. After spending a few hours searching through the forum to get a bit of info on MTL, I discovered that a lot of y’all don’t like MTL translators (or should I call them MTL Editors?). But I could see the dislike stemmed from very valid reasons. Anyways…I have a lot of spare time, and during that spare time I am usually reading tons of Korean novels. It started with reading translated chapters and quickly moved to me buying the novels and MTLing the chapters myself. I really enjoy the novels so much that I want to share the translations with others. Especially the ones that have been dropped by translators. It’s such a disappointment to be super invested in a novel only for it to be dropped. My English is great and also my first language. I do have professional editing experience from working for a well-known publishing company before I switch to the tech field. My understanding of Korean culture comes from growing up with a Korean parent. I can’t read Korean and I only understand minimal spoken word. I’m more than willing to put in the work to make quality readable chapters. I would love to gather some advice, information, and resources from you lovely folks on where to begin. If you reached the end, I’m sorry for the long ass post I also wanna note that I did try working with a translation group a few years back as an editor/proofreader but had issues with them not respecting the agreed upon 3 chapter per week and they aggressively tried to push me into doing 6+ chapters and also being openly racist. I would prefer to work alone stress-free.
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I don't even use Google translate because it comes out so awful. I tend to use Papago because it is easier to understand and very helpful with capturing the text with my phone.
what people hate is those people posting non-edited MTL. worse yet, people posting things worse than non-edited MTL
I once saw a synopsis for a novel on NU and it sounded amazing. I rushed over to the translator's page and tried to read the first chapter and I couldn't understand anything. I decided to buy the novel myself and once I began to mtl it, I quickly realized that the translator left out a large portion of the beginning part. The author was very descriptive and it would have taken some time to edit it and make sense of it. But instead of trying to produce a quality chapter they had just left it out and posted it online. ON TOP OF THAT they were charging for additional chapters. The audacity was in overflow lol.
I would definitely recommend using an online dictionary when editing your MTL. When I'm MTLing chinese novels for my personal use, I always have yabla open in another tab so I can look up anything that the machine translation was struggling to interpret correctly.
there are MTL translators who are really good at their work, to the point that it seems very natural and like the work of a proper human translator, so have more confidence in your work!
WordPress is free and I see a lot of people use it however I'm not very well versed with WordPress so I just post on wattpad since my account just exists. if you aren't trying to earn any money I think any site will work as long as its convenient. you can even post it as a word doc if you dont mind not having people comment on your translation I find wattpad nifty because there are paragraph comments so if anyone spots a mistake they can correct it on the spot its up to personal preference really the story being interesting is more important than user interface for most readers anyway
Google translate is actually quite decent, but I still consult yabla and baidu for slang, idiom and buzzwords.
I saw people complaining about a translator doing a job as a professional editing crew for free because he took out redundant sentences. (the post-edited chapters are free, the pre-edited are part of Patreon)
You may want to try assistant software like Translation Aggregator (which lets you quickly compare the results of multiple machine translation services - e.g. Google, Bing, and so on). Double checking results against different services can help reduce inaccuracies.
Hi, I'm a JP to EN translator but I wanna say that if you translate KR to EN with MTL, it's hard as hell. I tried once with so many translators and it just doesn't work for me. But Papago and Google Translate are by far, the best for KR novels as far as I know...
I used the two as a reference when translating the novel I am working on atm. If you want, you can take a look at what I have uploaded and tell me what you think! My website is shyheaux.com