Toxicity towards Machine Translations

[Datbel]

Hi, I'm a guy that roams and lurks periodically on the F95 on the Games corner, just wanted to say that the sudden increase of broken and low-effort machine translation uploads recently is not from a surgence of multiple uploaders, neither is it from the majority of uploaders on F95 themselves.

It's mostly coming from one guy, Stigmata. He's a user on SVScomics, and has translated (and broken) tons of games. He has made games crash on their own, he has broken saves to the point of affecting registry on your own computers, pretty much the whole 9 yards.

I dunno if I should share the link to his userpage on it because he has also been uploading professional translations without crediting, so I don't really want more traffic towards him to support what he's doing.

I don't have anything against MTL, but I know many do, and recently this post here-

https://f95zone.to/threads/the-ntr-pregnancy-hunting-adventure-of-karen-final-three-rain.44977/

-has been getting really hard flames. I've seen it across the site, but the way they're saying it is as if it's blaming the uploaders themselves.

The uploaders are simply sharing the game. Huge amount of toxicity is expected whenever a MTL game is posted, but some of it is leaking towards the uploaders, and I just wanted to get it out there.

 

[Callowayaway]

I wouldn't mind if the mods wanted to welcome all h-game uploads regardless of their language, but they don't. These machine translations have English words in them, but they aren't in English.

 

[prettystupid]

The biggest issue for some is that releasing an MTL English translation dampers interest in and likelihood of a proper, coherent translation. It's "good enough" for at least 30-40% of players, and the remaining number too few to push for a proper translation.

It can be particularly frustrating to have this happen for games where users can do MTL themselves, like with many made with RPGMaker.

There is an argument to be made that, in most cases, there wouldn't be a translation at all if not for MTL, and that the existence of it brings the game to a wider audience and may even spur interest to the point that the original devs or others translate the game where they wouldn't have before.

Personally, I appreciate people sharing MTL when they at least go to the basic effort of cleaning up basic formatting and grammar/spelling. Rewriting the text entirely can also be helpful, though this is dicey if they don't know the original language. Posting fixed files where MTL induces gameplay or script errors is always appreciated.

 

[SugarMint]

I would rather have no MTL versions than nothing at all, they're not coherent enough and a lot of the "meaning" is lost.

 

[215303j]

I don't understand the point of being toxic in a forum like this anyway.

If you don't like machine translations, NTR, incest, or games which are tagged "On Hold" or "Abandoned" then don't play it...

 

[Spiderling77]

It doesn't bother me but when the translator put bread instead of panty . . . that ruins my mood.

 

[Paz]

The alternative to poor machine translations is someone gritting his teeth and doing it manually, or even clean it up.
Unless people prefer no translations at all, but I bet most prefer semi-meaningful English than the alien gibberish that Russian or Japanese feel.

The problem with that is, everyone would like to have coherent English but very few (if any at all) are willing to invest the dozens of hours it requires to do so.
Agreed though -as mentioned above- that at least a cursory QA check should be done so the game is not completely broken (as I've done with many of mine in the past), but the caveat is it's not always that easy or evident if and where it breaks.

The toxicity you mention is hardly anything to bother yourself with though, as anyone who thinks the translator did a shitty job is more than free to try and make and better one. The tools are widely available.

 

[gears2260]

Proper translation is obviously the best but I would rather use machine translation if other option is trying to differentiate complex kanjis on a small window. Also most of the time you can understand what the "translated" sentence actually means.
For some reason machine translation always mistakes " you " with " I " and vice versa

 

[fitgirlbestgirl]

It doesn't bother me but when the translator put bread instead of panty . . . that ruins my mood.

Mmmh, moist bread.

 

[Rastafoo]

While I understand the necessity of machine translations to keep the "Latest Updates" tab looking fresh, this getting a bit ridiculous.

"A Virtual Taste of Unfaithfulness" - bugged
"Alchemist Another Story" - bugged

And numerous other machine translations on this site - bugged.
I've noticed its primarily an RPG Maker MV problem and doesn't happen with VX Ace.
That's probably because VX Ace won't start when files are missing, but MV will, until the textures appear.

 

[F4C430]

I would rather have no MTL versions than nothing at all, they're not coherent enough and a lot of the "meaning" is lost.

Then what do you do when there's no translation? Are you learning the language? Just trying to understand how having no meaning is better than having some meaning.

 

[khumak]

I'll still play machine translated games, but the translations are usually bad enough that it breaks immersion for me so I only skim enough of the text that I have a vague idea what's going on and just skip to the sex scenes. When I'm reading dialog it really needs to flow naturally or I just can't get into it.

I'm not going to hate on the devs that use machine translations, I'm just not very likely to really enjoy the game. In most cases the alternative is either no game at all from them or a game in Russian or something where you're just clicking things at random with no idea what's going on.

Coming at it from the opposite direction, if I made a game in English and people were requesting a version in Turkish or something, machine translation is the only option I would have so I can certainly see why that would be true for a lot of people when making an English version.

I don't really see much of a way around this unless your game is popular enough for some of your bilingual fans to offer to proof read your translations and send you corrections to make it sound more natural.