What does mtl mean? I'm not sure, but I see it a lot, especially for less known novels. I think it means lower quality translation, but I'd like to know the meaning of the acronym exactly please.
Machine TransLation Basically things like google translate that naturally result in much less readable translations than those done be people
Machine Translation engine.exe A thing that will broke many people mind for it's only for the hardcore reader or ignorance reader. After using this, you language and wording will be down for few level for each time using it.
Machine translations. Basically using software such as Google translate to translate novels. In general most MTL are obviously lower in quality than but translations which are proofread and properly edited by someone with a good grasp of the language can range from pretty good to high quality.
As everyone already said, it means Machine Translation. That said, it can be used on two different contexts. Simply throwing the text on Google Translate or whatever. The result will be somewhat hard to read and not very good overall, but should still give you a basic notion of what the story is about... We call this as Unedited Machine Translations. Those aren't accepted on NU. After throwing it on Google Translate or whatever, a person goes through the text and starts editing it into something that feels like proper English. They may also throw some phrases from the raw text into dictionaries to better understand their meaning, and they may also compare multiple results from different Machine Translation Softwares to get a better notion of the content of the chapter. We call those Edited Machine Translations, and they're allowed on NU. Unedited MTL is usually pretty bad, but Edited MTL can look really nice and can feel as good or better than a translation done manually (Obviously, this depends on how good the manual translation is) if the person doing the editing puts enough effort into it... But well, some people put really little effort into their editing and the final result can be pretty terrible. People often times associate MTL with low quality because they tend to automatically assume that the person doing the editing did not put any real effort into it... Which is not really true. Plenty of people dedicate quite a bit of time to get a good result of their MTL... But well, not always, sadly.
Again I'm amazed and perplexed how people felt the need to repeat answer from the first comment the thread should've ended with. Thread has less than a page worth of comments and people still can't bother to read them, especially since it's not a discussion thread, just a single question single answer.
It's okay. People just want to talk. And you can also see all kinds of answers here. Some are pretty funny or interesting.
Aside from the hardcore reader, it's also good for folks who are learning the original language. When you come across something that makes no sense, you research it, and slowly learn new vocab and grammar that way. Through skimming to find the part that you're confused on, you also build skimming skills in your target language. Reading in a language you're learning can be exhausting, but MTLing gives your brain a break, and keeps you interested, with short spurts of learning.