Discussion How much do you understand from mtling the raws?

100% of the words. like 40% of the context and 0% of why people read it.

 

If i read some translated chapters beforehand, i can understand pretty much all of this. And if you considered that's english isn't my first language, it's not really that brainhurting.
Read whole Hail the King and second half of Cultivation Chat Group.

 

as long as the sentences are short it's around 90% but when they go longer around 50% i would say

 

Tried reading mtl novels several times most esp when i end up reading novels with friggin cliffs and can't wait for the next chap. I understand a bit but not really a fan of it, because I'm used to reading proper sentences where i can understand quite perfectly. But that's just me though

 

(90%)

Been MTLing for over 6 years,,, my brain pretty much autocorrect stuffs.

 

25%
it freeze my brain making me unable to read for couple hours (ง ˙ω˙)ว lol

 

What in MTL is hard to understand or wrong translated is mostly Him/Her,He/she so not understanding the Gender of a Character, some Numbers are too wrong as in 10 thousend is 100 thousend or 1 Million is 1 Billion. Most of these things are easy to spot as wrong translated of a Maschine, maybe reread a line again to understand it. And like many said, Cultivation Novel are hard to reas as MTL'ed. In Cultivation Novel are often mixed Words of Elements (Wind,Fire,Water etc...) and some animal Race/Fantasy Race, like Storm/Wind Dragon can be bōlóng or fēnglóng. Both almost the Same meaning but the MTL makes it windy Dragon or Dragon blow maybe even Dragon Breath. Lets not even mention Cultivation Stages.

 

agree with the percentages estimated by folks above. however I will add - I sometimes overestimate how much I understand. When I read the actual translation later (for those that are picked up for translation) I often find places that I misinterpreted completely in mtl. I'll keep on mtl'ing because there are too many wonderful untranslated books that I want to enjoy - but boy howdy, the work that translation teams is so important and irreplaceable.

 

It mostly depends on the author's writing style. Sometimes novels translate better, sometimes they are garbled indecipherable messes.

On average, it's mostly legible. The more used to mtl you are, the better you understand poor mistranslations that occur often. The biggest is awkward idioms, and knowing to not trust shoehorned pronouns, as they can just be plain wrong.

A most common bit of confusion is numbering. This is related to cultural norms, as Japanese and Chinese both have the habit of grouping 10 and 10,000 as common units; so you can have a number modifying or counting in what a non native reader would consider as strsnge. Another is when the text says something like 67, 45, etc people; what it really means is 6 to/or 7, or 4 to/or 5.

The more you get used to it, the more it acts like recognizing a new language (as mtl). It slowly gets easier to intuitively recognize what is written.

 

For me, 60%. I'm currently translating a modern entertainment circle novel, and I use mtl (mainly Google Translate) as a back-up in addition to my knowledge of Chinese. There's a lot of modern sayings that don't mtl well or cultural differences or terms that are specific to different places or wordplays, which makes it hard to understand, like there whenever the text mentioned "red" they actually meant "popular" or "fresh flower" is actually "new actress," things like that. Of course, translating is slightly different from reading, b/c translating means that in addition to just understanding intuitively (if you're someone who knows you know things in your mind but when it comes to saying it out loud, you can't find the words, like me lol), you also need to find the appropriate term to express your understanding.

Since I usually use GT, I'll say that it really isn't that bad, especially since for parts that you don't understand you can GT separately in another tab, which may give you another meaning (so you understand more overall). With experience, mtl is fine, especially if you aren't particularly bothered with grammar. For my novel, most names translate well, though they occasionally make the "Chi" in "Chi Song" into "pond." The main point I would be bothered about is that when translating huge chunks (like copy-and-paste the whole chapter and then reading the mtl), sometimes parts of the text (particularly at the end of a paragraph) would be inexplicably dropped off. Like, it's just deleted and doesn't come out in the English version. For some words, (CN) authors would "censor" them- so between two characters in the same phrase, they might put a period or something. This can also prevent the mtl from giving the most correct translation as well. Overall, sometimes I might think something happened, but according to the raws I read something entirely different happened.

But the quality of mtl is getting better, I think. GT will rephrase sentences and stuff to make it flow better and everything.

Personally, I don't like to mtl novels and I just wait for the translations to come out, mainly because I feel that there's still a pretty large gap in quality. But I think that's really just personal preference.

 

genre, style, flowery word~ depend on that hmmm dunno never bother for detail how much understand~

hmm as long as get da main gist what it about it's fine

 

GT isn't really the best mtl. But I guess it does it's best

 

its gotten so bad that my understanding of normal text automatically translates into mtl
"hairy legs at her side" became "hairy breasts at her side"
and i read that sentence 4 times to read it correctly. maybe im dyslexic and mtl just made it worse