Petition to ban MTL

[CardinalRed]

Just create a tag for them (if there isn't already), and ignore them.

 

[GranTurboAutismo]

Necro. MTL tag where?
Moonrunes are infinitely better than a hackjob, loweffort MTL. Nobody is going to bother actually translating the game if some troll MTL's it first.
First impressions are important, people can bear playing a game in JP because they do not understand JP and can simply bruteforce their way through the game/menus.
If you have MTL trash-poetry as your first experience with the game, its the worst possible outcome.
MTL literally is not passable as a translation, and these guys are using it as a loophole to get games on this site.
Unless they use DeepL+edited MTL (which you would have to pay for, something I highly doubt these low effort posters do), MTL really should not have a place here.

Just hope Kagura doesn't take all of the fan translators, because they are.

 

[ChaosOpen]

Necro. MTL tag where?
Moonrunes are infinitely better than a hackjob, loweffort MTL. Nobody is going to bother actually translating the game if some troll MTL's it first.
First impressions are important, people can bear playing a game in JP because they do not understand JP and can simply bruteforce their way through the game/menus.
If you have MTL trash-poetry as your first experience with the game, its the worst possible outcome.
MTL literally is not passable as a translation, and these guys are using it as a loophole to get games on this site.
Unless they use DeepL+edited MTL (which you would have to pay for, something I highly doubt these low effort posters do), MTL really should not have a place here.

Just hope Kagura doesn't take all of the fan translators, because they are.

Why would you play a visual novel in which you don't understand a single word? Sure MTL is less than ideal, but with very few exceptions you can mostly at least parse the meaning of what they are trying to say. And while I won't deny that there are some MTL translators who seem to go out of their way to create as bad of a product as possible. I think we should encourage people to use MTL and then edit each line to prioritize readability over accuracy. Accuracy matters in historical and religious text where individual sentences are broken down over and over to find their hidden meanings and trying to get an accurate depiction of the person's thought process as they wrote. Not so much in visual novels when they are simply a tiny part of a larger narrative.

 

[F4C430]

Necro. MTL tag where?
Moonrunes are infinitely better than a hackjob, loweffort MTL. Nobody is going to bother actually translating the game if some troll MTL's it first.
First impressions are important, people can bear playing a game in JP because they do not understand JP and can simply bruteforce their way through the game/menus.
If you have MTL trash-poetry as your first experience with the game, its the worst possible outcome.
MTL literally is not passable as a translation, and these guys are using it as a loophole to get games on this site.
Unless they use DeepL+edited MTL (which you would have to pay for, something I highly doubt these low effort posters do), MTL really should not have a place here.

Just hope Kagura doesn't take all of the fan translators, because they are.

There was no reason to necro this. A quick look into the appropriate subforum tells you that all tag requests are on hold.

If you prefer "moonrunes" the original version is often shared in the translation request subforums either on here or on ULMF. There are other places to get games.

I really wonder how many people who complain about MTL are paying any money to the people wasting many many hours of their lives doing "proper" translations with paid tools.

 

[GranTurboAutismo]

Why would you play a visual novel in which you don't understand a single word? Sure MTL is less than ideal, but with very few exceptions you can mostly at least parse the meaning of what they are trying to say. And while I won't deny that there are some MTL translators who seem to go out of their way to create as bad of a product as possible. I think we should encourage people to use MTL and then edit each line to prioritize readability over accuracy. Accuracy matters in historical and religious text where individual sentences are broken down over and over to find their hidden meanings and trying to get an accurate depiction of the person's thought process as they wrote. Not so much in visual novels when they are simply a tiny part of a larger narrative.

This does not explicitly apply to visual novels. Literally every game genre is getting the MTL treatment and you give too much credit to the spammers to actually edit their garbage MTL. What's happening on this site is no different from Chinese knockoff products, the entire purpose is to flood the site with low quality garbage so nobody actually bothers to translate things for real.

If the admins/mods actually gave a crap about quality of their site they wouldn't let MTL fly.

> hurr you gotta pay money to have an opinion
> you gotta eat shit before you can tell me it's shit

I translate using DeepL for myself, it is slow but it is always going to be a better product than that of a guy in a basement churning out 100 MTLd games a day.

 

[ChaosOpen]

This does not explicitly apply to visual novels. Literally every game genre is getting the MTL treatment and you give too much credit to the spammers to actually edit their garbage MTL. What's happening on this site is no different from Chinese knockoff products, the entire purpose is to flood the site with low quality garbage so nobody actually bothers to translate things for real.

If the admins/mods actually gave a crap about quality of their site they wouldn't let MTL fly.

What I am saying is that using MTL is not inherently bad, it is simply a means to get from Japanese to English text. Ideally, you'd want a bunch of people that can read and write fluent Japanese to be spamming out games. The problem is people who can read and write fluent Japanese are few and far between, and it isn't a viable career path because even if they do take the time to do it, they are rarely if ever given credit much less money for their work. So, there really isn't much motivation to do that compared to anime subs or manga and light novel translations.

However, with the magic of technology, you can use a MTL to get the raw Japanese text into a form that is at least readable. The problem is people think that once you have the raw machine translation then they are done and they can put the text back into the game. I have seen quite a few "machine translations" that were wonderfully done by people who don't speak a word of Japanese, but when they post it they get the same response, people don't even download the game and tell them that something they spent weeks on is a crap waste of time they aren't even going to try to confirm their assumption. A real mood killer, making them unlikely to do it again.

 

[Deleted member 1462538]

Just create a tag for them (if there isn't already), and ignore them.
[/QUO

What I am saying is that using MTL is not inherently bad, it is simply a means to get from Japanese to English text. Ideally, you'd want a bunch of people that can read and write fluent Japanese to be spamming out games. The problem is people who can read and write fluent Japanese are few and far between, and it isn't a viable career path because even if they do take the time to do it, they are rarely if ever given credit much less money for their work. So, there really isn't much motivation to do that compared to anime subs or manga and light novel translations.

However, with the magic of technology, you can use a MTL to get the raw Japanese text into a form that is at least readable. The problem is people think that once you have the raw machine translation then they are done and they can put the text back into the game. I have seen quite a few "machine translations" that were wonderfully done by people who don't speak a word of Japanese, but when they post it they get the same response, people don't even download the game and tell them that something they spent weeks on is a crap waste of time they aren't even going to try to confirm their assumption. A real mood killer, making them unlikely to do it again.

You explain it way better than me, thanks dude.

 

[Meaning Less]

There are levels of MTL if you aren't aware:
-MOST games are MTL assisted even some of the best translations still will have chunks of MTL inside them;
-some are full mtl but just edited to hide glaring mistakes under the carpet but the translation is still far from correct;
-lots of them are fully automated because it is faster but it still required a few adjustments later to avoid errors, this process of translating and fixing mistakes is not something anyone can do and takes some time.
-a few were manually translated but everything was just dropped into deepl or google that would still classify as MTL to me, translation is still wrong and sometimes those have MORE errors than fully automated ones because humans are more prone to mistakes when doing repetitive tasks;

So where would you draw the line? to me if you can finish the game without game breaking bugs it is more than worth the share and I appreciate the effort.

Technically only games translated directly from japanese would not be considered MTL and those are very rare.

If f95 starts ignoring MTL people will just migrate to other websites that are happily sharing more jap games even if they are MTL, so it would be stupid of them to take this stance.
Just wait for the tag and until then ignore all japanese games if you really don't want to see any MTL.