I use Google Translate site to translate the entire novel webpage from RAW Chinese source. In the past it worked great. Now though, the translation become much worse, almost always opposite to the original texts. I have to copy and paste text sentence by sentence if I want a rather accurate translation now, when I never needed to years ago. I never read Korean novel from RAW. Japanese novels are still as readable as before. So only Chinese translation has become worse to me.
I have no troubles MTLing Chinese modern novels, but what Google Translate seems to have troubles with are xianxia/cultivation terms. There the text becomes really nausea-inducing, so I stay away from historicals in general.
Stories that have gone through mtl now is slightly similar to the actual story (5/10) Not to the point the author parent won’t recognise it on the street, If you take it home and have it stand next to the original raw, it’s the inferior copy that everyone will ridicule to the point it’ll blacken and retaliate against everyone. Nephew Cokcroaches is so crooked, what on it is so similar to Joint Jade?? Get it out of here! Says the cousin, who is also Joint Jade’s fan.
I would also say that MTL is more readable if you have a basic comprehension of Chinese grammar structure because then you can understand when Google Translate spits out what seems to be a mess of a sentence and guess what the original sentence structure was most likely like. Great for when your vocab is insufficient to read in raw, but your grammar is pretty good.
If you look at certain MTL sites, you will be able to find the first 50 or so chapters have good translations but after that MTL quality becomes worse. In short, even if you find good machine translation, chances are the good is only for the first few chapters. Stay far away from MTL
Google translate is simply the best for reading mtl, since it's api is constantly being improved the being invested by Google themselves so it has gotten way better than before while mtl sites are just what you should avoid cause iirc they all using the same translation engine for their mtl. DeepL is also not bad but for translating entire chapters Google is still the best from what I've seen, only problem with DeepL and Google tl is when it comes to certain chinease terms from historical or high fantasy cultivation novels it becomes unreadable when the author is writing about cultivation realms and items. For those I'd sorta recommend Comrade Mao given they do make an effort to Improve their mtl engine particularly when it comes to reading cultivation nobles but from what I've seen it's still a mixed bag So ranking wise it's : 1. Google Tl(always try Google tl first and compare other websites with it as the bench mark) 2.DeepL( when it comes to translating novels needs way more improvement 3. ComradeMao (only. For chinease novels)