Petition to ban MTL

Hentai_Kishi

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Jul 24, 2018
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As I said in a previous post, the big problem with MTL is that when people machine translate they just throw the whole game into the machine and consider it done.

Even if the translator doesn't know the language and use the help of a translation service people should at least have the decency of editing sentences and trying to make sense of things that are said in the game before they define a project as "Translation Complete". MTL would be way more bearable that way. Some of the horrible things I have seen in MTL game dialogues would be quickly corrected if the game had some sort of proofreader. Banning things almost never is the solution to the actual problem.
 

wyldstrykr

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Nov 30, 2017
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mtl is good for games that has english interface patch.
also you should add 10chars to that "no."
 

anne O'nymous

I'm not grumpy, I'm just coded that way.
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Even if the translator doesn't know the language and use the help of a translation service people should at least have the decency of editing sentences and trying to make sense of things that are said in the game before they define a project as "Translation Complete".
I'm curious. How do they could achieve, by themselves since you don't talk about an external help, to turn the MTL into something meaningful if they "doesn't know the language" ?
To edit a sentence in order for it to make sense, you need to understand that it don't make sense. And in order to understand that this sentence don't make sense, you need to know the language enough for you to be able to read this sentence without the help of a machine.

Therefore, if the translator don't know the language, he should just not even try to translate it by himself, dot.
 

Hentai_Kishi

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Jul 24, 2018
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I'm curious. How do they could achieve, by themselves since you don't talk about an external help, to turn the MTL into something meaningful if they "doesn't know the language" ?
To edit a sentence in order for it to make sense, you need to understand that it don't make sense. And in order to understand that this sentence don't make sense, you need to know the language enough for you to be able to read this sentence without the help of a machine.

Therefore, if the translator don't know the language, he should just not even try to translate it by himself, dot.
You don't need college tuition to tell that a translated sentence from google translate is out of order or doesn't make sense when you translate it to your language. What you said about understanding the language completely isn't always the case since there are edited MTL games on this site that are a joy to play and you only sometimes notice inconsistencies, most sentences in games are short phrases, the translator surely can think about it for a second and try to make sense of the broader story and context. Actually, what I said happens very frequently, japanese doujins for example: The translation teams sometimes have people who actually understand the language but it's not all of them and when they don't have someone they translate with the help of tools, try to make sense of what's being said and the general story, then they edit it to make as much sense as possible. Btw, this also happens with non-erotic anime and manga, even with light novels on a lesser scale.

yes mtl is bad but not every japanese game/vn will be translated in english. mtl is good for those game that wont be translated for a good while.
Truth, what if people want to play a more underground game that won't get an official translation by some big company? Are they supposed to cry and wait for the game until it's released or more accurately, IF it's ever released?

You left out the part where I said that MTL is more BEARABLE that way, I meant that even if it's not pristine perfection you can still play through it; Would I want a 50+ hour story heavy visual novel machine translated? No. But for small or medium games MTL works just fine provided that the machine translator has the decency to edit it properly and the site here tags it for the people that don't want to see it. At the end of the day an edited machine translated game is better than no game at all.
 

anne O'nymous

I'm not grumpy, I'm just coded that way.
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You don't need college tuition to tell that a translated sentence from google translate is out of order or doesn't make sense when you translate it to your language.
Firstly this is mostly true only for Asian languages, because of their construction ; yet it happen less nowadays. For any other languages, the main problem caused by MTL is the literal aspect of this translation, that focus more on the words than on the meaning. What imply that, with exception but not this frequents nowadays, once translated back to your own language, the sentence will be altered but still meaningful and near enough to what you tried to express. This even if effectively it will be something stupid in English because the translation was made through the use of a homograph, and so have a totally different meaning.
Secondly it don't change the main point of my comment. Due to his absence of knowledge regarding the English language, the author have no way to correct the translation.


What you said about understanding the language completely isn't always the case since there are edited MTL games on this site that are a joy to play and you only sometimes notice inconsistencies, most sentences in games are short phrases, the translator surely can think about it for a second and try to make sense of the broader story and context.
Be consistent please. You can't at first talk about people who "doesn't know the language", then argument by using the case of people who are relying on MTL because their knowledge is too limited. They are two different kind of people.


Truth, what if people want to play a more underground game that won't get an official translation by some big company?
As if big companies where a sign of quality in regard of translation. There's even a good example of the opposite in this thread.


Are they supposed to cry and wait for the game until it's released or more accurately, IF it's ever released?
No offense, but how young are you exactly ?
What you describe is what everyone that turned 15 before mid/late 00's had to live with. And not just for games. In the mid 80's manga started to rise in France, but it's only in the late 90's, early 00's, that they started to be massively translated. Before that all the shops, many being dedicated to mangas, were selling 99% of untranslated import.
If you weren't able to read Japanese, then yes, you were waiting for the translation, without knowing if there will be one. We lived perfectly with this fact, and haven't died because there's this fucking manga that every one describe as amazingly marvelous but that we never read because there's no translation for it.

One can perfectly live without having played a game, even more an adult games, read a book/manga, seen a movie, because there's no translation in a language he understand. What is the case of the, probably near to 4 billions, peoples who don't have at least a basic understanding of English.