News A better machine translation for chinese webnovels

I know many of us have read novels on machine translation sites, with great effort and pain. There are many novels that aren't being translated or some are being translated at such slow pace that we can't take it. Thus we resort to machine translation. what if there were to be a site that provides a bit better translation than many many others? what if this site were also to be one that allows us to use a translator to manually translate the novel we want to read? Now there is such site. Welcome to : https://novel.babelchain.org/ . All you need to do is create an account. then go to translate section, provide link of a chapter of your favorite novel and it will be translated. There is a limited number of translation attempts but the quality will still be 30% better than regular machine translation. It is still machine translation but developers worked quite hard and made it far better than usual machine translation sites we go to and better than google translation and mate translation free version too. It will have way too many discrepancies but it will still not hurt your brain as much as it hurts when you try some other sites. This is completely an ad-free site too. So please give it a try.

Disclaimer : I am not part of staff of this site or developer of the site or being paid by this site. I am just sharing this so that people can know that they have a better solution in case they want to read some of their novel but is forced to use brain damaging machine translation.

 

The way I see it.
If it cost $10 for a human to translate a chapter.
If 1000 people donate $1

That is 100 chapters.
You have good intentions but you are putting your effort in the wrong place.
Look at Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, the novel is translated on demand via donations.
Peace!

 

Need a translator to try this site to see if it's worth it or not

 

You don't need a translator to check if it is worth it or not. Just take a raw that has already been translated and compare it to an already done translation and a google translation.

I'd do it but I'm too lazy to make an account...

 

I can not see anything without a login, and the login/register do not work for me, do not know why. Btw there are already sites that support mtl with support for unknown parts "badly translated parts" with voting system for the user to change the respective translation sequences or which novel should be added into the "mtl support".

 

I just went there and can't even make an account.

 

Is there something wrong with my browsers or no matter how many times I try to press log in, it doesn't respond at all

 

IMO, machine translation is shit, better or not. Its not just about finding equivalent word from a certain anguage to another.

 

As a sad human that mtls the majority of my novels...
I'm so happy to see something like this

 

Can’t seem to login. Other than that, this site looks heavenly...

 

Hey, Google Translate is cool too.

 

What features does it have?

Personally if I'd have to pay anyway I'd probably get the systranet API licence and (try to) make something out of that

 

I agree that the intention is good but the way these people do things at Babel are way too disrespectful!

If you try to go over their uploaded novels here in NU, you'll find some that they just mercilessly snatched away from the current human translator! I guess they look at the potential of the novel and then do the machine translations ahead of the human translation and then, BAM! they upload it in NU... pissing off the human translator.. and being discouraged, the human translator will just drop the novel!

As a reader, I am honestly frustrated. Of course when you read via mtl, you'll get the gist of the story. But for me, I just don't want to "know" the story.. I want to "feel" the emotions that the author wants to convey. In the end, machine is still a machine.

If these Babel people will continue to snatch novels that are currently being worked on by a translation group or even by an amateur translator, then we'll lose more human translators in the future. Those who got a license for a novel are all good but how about those who didn't?! They wanted to fan translate due to passion or as a hobby.. but how would they feel when some Babel people just went on and continued the translation.. and uploaded it in NU?!?! Just because the human translation is slow?!?!

Sorry, but there is NO WAY I WILL SUPPORT THIS BABEL WHATEVER THING! I am patient in waiting for updates for the novels I am following. If I can't really wait I read via Google translate or Bing.. or go to the Spoilers forum.. where I also put up spoilers sometimes.

Of course most people won't care. But I just want to voice out what I feel as a member of the NU community for around 3 years now.

Hope the NU admins would look into this Babel thing further to protect the interest of the legit translators who work their ass of day and night just to give us quality translations.

 

This is like in that movie Accepted.

Sherman Schrader: It was your idea to put "acceptance is just one click away"
Bartleby "B" Gaines: Yeah, you put it as "one click away"! You don't make it... clickable!

The developer of this site apparently subscribes to Bartleby "B" Gaines's philosophy.

 

It’s not that all Machine translation is shit it’s just that machine translation does not work well between different language families and sentence structure arrangements

 

Unfortunately the licensed ones aren't left alone either. They post edited MTL of a number of licensed novels, continuing on from the latest human translated chapter to try and poach views. And now they're moving towards paywalling their MTL by implementing a currency.

 

It is free. just making an account is all. there is a limit of daily number of machine translation but it can not be removed by paying. they are not much interested in adding pay options. people asked but they don't even want to add advertisement in site, which is very cool and i hope they never do it. someone asked if they want to make money by adding crypto mining, they said no.

They are currently updating their entire site structure. They are testing a whole lot of stuff, It will be like this for this week i think. So it will go up for couple of hours and then go down for a couple and then go back up for couple of more.

i understand what both of you are saying. but as far as i know the site staff only mtl novels that people ask for. that is how they started as far as i know. and currently there are only 2 novel they directly mtl and post, rest are all done by community using translator. they had to restructure and discard a whole bunch because QI came knocking their doors. it was after that they added the translator so that people can do their own translations.

 

clicks 'sign up | log in'
nothing happens

maybe i'll just come back later

 

maintenance going on now. it will come back up in a couple of hours.

 

You know what the funniest thing is about mtl for me? I often like mtls better than human translation. In an mtl any poor writing of the novel itself, I am able to blame on the translation. Or sometimes if the translation is unclear, I imagine what I think would be the best thing to happen. High quality human translations, especially excellent ones are so well done, that the faults of the story themselves show through far more easily. Often I will read an entire series on mtl and then reread it when the human translation catches up, and I find myself disliking the plot more than when I read it on mtl.

By no means am I trashing human translation, I am complementing them for their quality. It just so happens that often, these novels are not Shakespearean in quality, even if their translations are. I give all my thanks to translators for their hard work.