Discussion Improving The Quality of Translations

How would you increase the quality of translations?
I am talking specifically about Google translate that is slightly edited and being passed off as translation
@AliceShiki It is not MTL when you are good enough to use a dictionary.
Personally, I say we run them out of business.
I have been playing with the idea of community MTL for the past 2 years
A translation/language school plan went bust when I didn't get the investment I was expecting
but that is still possible but would have to be next year

MAHGA!!!

 

They could try to run it through word or heck any spellchecker and at least there won't be a typo or two in every damn sentence.

That's a start. (Though that's admittedly the least of my problems when reading...)

 

good luck on outrunning a certain illegal imouto.

 

All imoutos should be legal, i mean it's your blood too.

 

its one of those stranger who suddenly came up and claim to be your imouto . it doesn't mean that i hate incest tho

 

Even if its perfect English, you might end up reading a completely different story : sex might be swapped due to genderless pronouns, a name can be translated into a word.
Painting shit with gold is still shit

Not sure what you mean

 

You know this is a really good question, I know we're supposed to act like translators our gods gift to the world, and they can do no wrong, but it is annoying when a work you're interested in gets a shoddy translation. People say stuff like "translate it yourself if you don't like it" but do they really think learning a new language is that easy? Sure someone doing something for free is nice, it's like coming home from a hard day at work and finding out your bud cooked you dinner. I just don't get why we're still supposed to smile and act super grateful, even if the food taste like crap.

I guess if I was the bad cook, I would feel really hurt if all my work was put down, still I hope I at least have enough awareness to know whether or not I am doing a good job. I cook should taste test their food before they serve, and a translator should read over their translation before they post.

 

Very true. Many even get donations but I doubt they invest in things like language courses to improve.
I feel that if there is a wiki styled lnmtl website that provides MTL then edited MTL won't be in demand anymore since pretty much every novel will already have a MTL version.

By the way calling it crap food is being too nice, Some qualify as poison

 

I originally wrote "charred black" but I figured that was an exaggeration since most of the time bad translations are at least still readable, so I shouldn't compare it to inedible food. I then changed it "taste like shit" but ended up changing it again because I feel like I need to rein in my language a little. I have been swearing a little too much lately.

 

When I'd first realized a site I used to think was just a bad TL or bad English was just slightly edited MTL, it opened my eyes. My past experience with MTL was from lnmtl.com and sites who stated that they were MTL. In the past, I didn't know that there were MTL sites that wouldn't admit it or just never opening stated it on the website to give the impression of a "translation." I was kinda just unaware and didn't pay much attention to just how dirty the novel translating world could be. I just kinda just trusted NU to not include the "bad" stuff/sites. I had thought it as "this is a niche and fun community of nerds and readers and good people that just like to have fun and read" mentality so I forgot this was the Internet and the real world so there will be bound to be snakes and bugs. It really opens your eyes once you see it especially when I finally looked at the rules for getting releases on NU.

When I just decided to go to the raws and chrome auto-google MTL, I found how little the differences compared to the "translations" were. Especially since you'd kinda realized how much different the amount of time and work compared to real translators and the few hardworking and diligent good MTLs was put into it. These bad MTLs are just trying to capitalize on people ignorant of it especially when you realize how they "release translations" one by one when the reader themselves could just MTL yourself or lnmtl and catch up to the raws.

I think readers and newer nuffians are ignorant of the politics, schemes, greys, rats, and drama in this community.

 

I don't think there are any quick shortcuts. The only way for translations to improve is if the translators learn skills which help them better interpret the text.

I started translating a Japanese novel some months ago, and I can see a massive improvement in my translations because of all the time I spent trying to figure out the language, the context of the sentences, and the author's intent. I also am super, super lucky to be able to ask for help from other (legitimate) translators in my group, who are extremely generous in taking the time to explain the things I translated wrongly and how I can understand the real meaning.

I think that the main thing that's needed to translate is reading comprehension. You need to be able to understand not only the words themselves, but also what's happening in the story and what the author is trying to do by writing something the way they did. This is something you can't execute via pure MTL (editing from google), but it's something that you can learn and practice by doing actual translation work, even if you're going word by word/sentence by sentence.

...At least, that's what I tell myself to stay motivated to make my translations better

 

First, I will apologize since I'm a little out of it because of migraine meds so I may not make sense.

Second, I think that you can only improve those who want to improve by making tools available for them. What exactly those tools are I'm not clear on, other than a dictionary.

I'll be honest, I've thought of trying to learn Japanese and starting a translation. One of my favorite stories stopped being translated at chapter ten. I've read it from Google translate since and wanted to share since I really like the story. However, I would not be satisfied with just edited MTL, and I have no clue how to start otherwise.

...did I make sense?

 

Hold on, what if the original writer just wrote the book in english? Mind Blown!

 

I am saying a way to curtail the spread pf MTL sites trying to pass off as translations is to have a mtl wiki site.
Because people do not compare with Google translate, it is not so easy to tell
If the Google translate version is already available on the wiki MTL site, it will be easier to spot frauds

 

I'm confused, I get that the goal is trying to improve the overall quality of available translations, but wouldn't this be going too far? If the MTL is already available who is going to want to step up to translate?

Again, I'll apologize if I'm not understanding something right.

 

But that doesn't sound like something you can make money from...

Jokes aside, it sounds like a lot of work to maintain a wiki that hosts MTL of every chapter of any story.

I don't think anyone is fooled into thinking that straight MTL is actual translation. If it sounds convincing, there must be some kind of work done to it. I had the impression that most MTLers say that they MTL though, so there's not much fraud to discover.
I don't think it's inherently bad to MTL when people are working on stories other people aren't picking up. Though I guess it's a different matter when translator drama gets involved.

 

The goal is to drive traffic away from "fake translators"
Check out this website lnmtl.com
It does not prevent translations.

Sometimes people don't spot the obvious until you tell it to their face

 

That's why it will be a wiki. I won't manage it.
I could add a download page or chapter option even.
Web hosting costs works in a sort of diminishing returns. The poor you pay, the harder it gets for you to use up all the bandwidth

 

I totally relate Let me give you some resources!
I was recently recommended this website for learning the basics of Japanese grammar. It's very concise and runs you through a lot of important rules. It teaches the basic building blocks of the language, like how to identify adjectives and how verbs are conjugated. More importantly, though, it also touches on the more difficult stuff such as what all the different particles mean, how to identify who is doing what in a sentence, and how to figure out what people are talking about when they skip words/leave things implied.
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar

If you know anything about Japanese, even just basic words and phrases from anime, then you should be able to start figuring things out. There are a lot of quirks in Japanese that don't translate easily into English, like all of the suffixes (-chan, -san) and conjugations for politeness (keigo... the horror ). Understanding all of that stuff is pretty tough, but if you have a background in watching anime or reading manga, you already have a sense for how people talk to each other with different words depending on their relationships and personalities. So you'd have some foundation to build your learning from, even if it's... a little shaky I definitely did not learn anything 'correct' from anime/manga, but they did teach me basic words and sentence structures which helped a lot when I started translating.

https://jisho.org/ Jisho is my JP-ENG dictionary of choice. It's not good to rely on it for everything since it only puts out very simplified translations, but it's very useful when first starting out. Later on when you have more experience reading Japanese sentences, you would move on to using dictionaries in Japanese.

 

The question then becomes "how does the average reader find the translations they read".

If they only click the next chapter link from NU wouldn't your wiki be redundant?