Hey, so I was wondering, if anyone has any experience related to polishing MTL translations with Grammarly and if buying premium helps the quality of translation. I would rather invest some money to buy Grammarly then read MTL as they are. (but only if premium version has significant improvements on text) So I appreciate every help, thanks in advance.
I’m not sure, never thought about that. It might work with some MTL’s but definitely not the majority as most MTL’s don’t just have bad grammar but terrible word-to-word translations that mess up the entire meaning. But that’s just my opinion, if you end up giving it a try then let us know!
Grammarly looks for more clear & concise word choice / sentence structure, which does help readability. It does absolutely nothing for accuracy though- in many cases potentially making it worse. In my personal opinion, Grammarly is an excellent tool for actual translators to help out with their wording. Unfortunately, it is not a tool for end users to try to fix something that's already broken. Where I'd particularly love to see it used is in cases where the translator does not have English as their native language. Would save a lot of the learning curve / hassle.
If you use say google translate or baidu translate (for CN -> ENG, idk about other langue pairs) the issue is the translation accuracy, not the sentence structure. In the first place those already go out of their way to generally make sentences flow better at the loss of making the accuracy worse. That said, maybe if you use systran translate (which has pretty bad sentence structure, though there's nothing wrong with the grammar). Personally I think you should just read MTL as is (my preference is systran, which is used on LNMTL) and when some weird stuff shows up then you look at the raw and pull out the dictionary (or even better, just use a popup dictionary, so all you need is to hover over the raw text and it will show dictionary translations). Even better if you make terms like on LNMTL or Comrade Mao so if you know some common translations fails you can fix it automatically for all future chapters. e.g. you can start by just adding the MC and friends' names, some common moves or attacks. MC's school, etc.
Grammarly is a great tool to polish your work. That is, if the original work is in english. But Chinese characters can possess many meanings so if you MTL without carefully cross checking the context, tracking the most appropriate words, or even abandoning unnecessary phrases and words, then it will still be useless. MTL took an instant to process CN to English. While translating a chapter took hours. There is a difference. So no, it won't be worth it to pay a premium in Grammarly if you want to read well translated novels.
It sounds like a pretty horrible idea. If you're willing to put this much book into reading books, it's probably easier to just learn the language instead.
Honestly try LNMTL with some plugins. I'm a firm believer that the best MTL (besides very well edited and researched, akin more to machine-assisted translation) is to just make terms like on LNMTL and Comrade Mao. My preference is LNMTL and systran, but I know some people can't stand systran because the sentence structure gets off, I prefer it though because I know how the English sentences are supposed to look like so I can fix that, but it's much harder to fix inaccurate translations, especially when you've got something like Google Translate that likes to remove chunks and is very inconsistent in how it translates. With that said, some people do prefer having a smooth reading-experience, even if the translation accuracy is lower. But these days on LNMTL there's some neat plugins made by users on the discord so you can still use LNMTL's UI and glossary/terms fit to the novel you're reading, but still use the machine translator of your choice. GT, Baidu Translate, NiuTrans (this one seems pretty good actually, and I keep seeing people reccing it in discord, I'll try it some day myself)
Do you still use systran? I preferred it as well, but the systran browser extension hasn't been working for me since they released an update for it the end of September. The public api server seems to have been taken down around the same time as well.
Yeah the new systranet site is basically just like google now (since end of 2019), so I don't use it. And while I had the systran browser extension on chrome it's been a long time since I last used it since I only read MTL on LNMTL for a long time now, so idk about that. Systran on LNMTL is still rule-based though so it works like it did before. Though I think they've updated their glossary as well so it's still slightly different. But you're bringing up a good point, if I were to MTL on my own with word replacer II and some translation engine like I used to before LNMTL, then systran might not be a good option anymore. I know for sure that I'd never use Google Translate though, it's just too inconsistent, it constantly removes chunks of text and sometimes entire paragraphs, and for whatever reason after a sentence/paragraph becomes too long random words get translated as cockroach, scorpion, etc. So if I had to I'd probably try out a few MTs, NiuTrans and Baidu Translate comes to mind. If they all sucks too much I'd probably just give up on MTL tbh.