2y ago

The Ancient Magus' Bride Manga's Return Gets Simultaneous English Release Using AI Translation

www.animenewsnetwork.com

As much as people would love to think that localizers are getting what they deserve, this isn't the bad ones being removed, it's just cost saving.

I for one won't pay for AI translation of anything since I can do that on my own if I wanted to read a machine translation.

10 comments

This feels insulting. If there's one thing publishers shouldn't copy from every other scanlator, it's MTL (not saying all scanlation teams do, but there are too many that do). Why the hell would I pay for this.
Seven Seas Entertainment is releasing the The Ancient Magus Bride manga in English
Why am I not surprised
- I don't know anything about the translation industry, but I've read a few manga published by Seven Seas. Have they always been one of the cheaper ones?
  Is there an up to date tier list of publishes somewhere?
  
  I don't know the ins and outs, but they're supposedly one of the worse companies to their translators and the actual translations:
  https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2022-05-29/seven-seas-releases-statement-on-workers-union/.186135
  https://twitter.com/_UW7S/status/1531626411605127169
  https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2021-04-26/why-seven-seas-altered-its-light-novels/.171956
  
  If seven seas is publishing something it's not worth reading. They've been caught doing censorship multiple times. Go look for literally any other way to enjoy what you are into.
As a music producer working with a different AI to change my voice, this is not great.
I mean sure they are saving money, but probably with the wrong thing. QA is such a major aspect of this and QA will get neglected in this. This will result in translations that are disjointed from the plot, or straight up really bad quality, because double checking is where costs are saved here probably.
- Exactly. There are plenty of fan subs out there that use machine translation (google) and sometimes it's close, other times ... it's beyond nonsense.
  If it's a same day release they are not doing QA... Short term money grab. I wouldn't be surprised to see their subscription prices increase in 6-12 months after all their regular subs leave after bad translations
  
  If it's a same day release they are not doing QA... Short term money grab.
  Even if they are doing QA, that's still a short term money grab imo. QA should be one of the final checks, not one of the first. And how the QA process is, is also important. If they only look at the translated version, then they can easily miss the actual mistakes made, because sentences could flow fine, but be entirely wrong. If they have the original text and have to compare, then they probably might as well translate the entire thing themselves, so it's likely the former process. I wouldn't be surprised if QA would be less motivated too if what they had to check, was machine translated.
I could see it working if the machine result has a pass over done by editors. If it’s just straight from AI to Publish it’ll probably be bad.
Honestly, these days I'd prefer advanced mtl to a shitty localization every time. Nintendo has turned me into a hard liner, working to figure out what the fuck a character just said is better than that character just not saying anything. I'm an old head, i remember needing to work that shit out, it sucked but at least it wasn't purposefully mangled.
Man i miss fanlations being the standard, they are so much better.
- Localization is necessary though. I agree that localization can go too far, but most translations have some form of it, because languages have their own unique quirks and nuances, that MTL won't pick up on, losing its meaning or impact in the process. If it's dependent on QA to be good, it's doing it wrong. QA should be the last gate, not the first.

10 comments