- Aug 25, 2017
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While it does not exactly prevent someone else from translating it, it can and very likely will discourage people from wanting to. One of the issues with bad MTLs is that once it's out and people play it, they're not likely to play it again. Their saves might not work and/or they might find it too much of a hassle to redo everything just to see the story. People that haven't played it might look at the resulting poor ratings and reception and think it's worse than it actually is. It's more practical to work on something no one's touched yet because it maximizes the amount of people that will enjoy it.So question, if someone does a bad MTL, does it prevent others from actually able to translate it correctly? Since that seems to be a reoccuring theme unless the game was already broken to begin with.
The other reason is that it's demotivating. When people encourage/praise MTLs, it devalues proper translations. It signals to the potential translator that the game's story isn't worth working on. What's the point of spending days or weeks translating something if people will settle for much less? I've even seen a case where a machine translator told a manual translator they're not needed.