What Do You Think About Translated Games? (ChatGPT, DeepL, etc.)

[LfkCn]

I've seen many games being criticized for poor English. So, what do you think about translated games? Do you find their translations sufficient?

Nowadays, programs like ChatGPT and DeepL can translate almost flawlessly—at least from my native language to English. Of course, the original text must be well-written, or the translation won't be good either. I can communicate with people on platforms like Reddit, but if I make a game, my English needs to be really good—which it isn't.

I'm wondering if using ChatGPT to translate the texts in my game, just as I do with long texts, would be a problem. As I mentioned above, it translates well based on my observations, but it feels a bit robotic to me. It doesn't sound like two real people talking—it feels more like an AI is speaking.

You might ask: If your English isn't that good, how can you tell the difference? As I said, it's just a feeling. Maybe I'm wrong. That's why I'm sharing this post—I want to hear your thoughts on this. Does AI-translated English bother you when playing games?

By the way, my native language is Turkish. I'm mentioning this because AI translations of some Asian languages often have serious issues and require manual corrections. However, this doesn't seem to be a problem with Turkish. ChatGPT can translate almost flawlessly, but I don't know if it uses words that ordinary people would use or if it sounds more like a robot or an academic.

 

[Pretentious Goblin]

I'm biased against it because almost everything translated is Japanese, and their writing generally sucks ass to begin with.

The English in this thread is pretty much flawless from what I'm reading, and it would be good enough for me to enjoy in a game.

 

[CaptainBipto]

I've seen many games being criticized for poor English. So, what do you think about translated games? Do you find their translations sufficient?

Nowadays, programs like ChatGPT and DeepL can translate almost flawlessly—at least from my native language to English. Of course, the original text must be well-written, or the translation won't be good either. I can communicate with people on platforms like Reddit, but if I make a game, my English needs to be really good—which it isn't.

I'm wondering if using ChatGPT to translate the texts in my game, just as I do with long texts, would be a problem. As I mentioned above, it translates well based on my observations, but it feels a bit robotic to me. It doesn't sound like two real people talking—it feels more like an AI is speaking.

You might ask: If your English isn't that good, how can you tell the difference? As I said, it's just a feeling. Maybe I'm wrong. That's why I'm sharing this post—I want to hear your thoughts on this. Does AI-translated English bother you when playing games?

By the way, my native language is Turkish. I'm mentioning this because AI translations of some Asian languages often have serious issues and require manual corrections. However, this doesn't seem to be a problem with Turkish. ChatGPT can translate almost flawlessly, but I don't know if it uses words that ordinary people would use or if it sounds more like a robot or an academic.

Personally, I don't have any problems with AI translations, but I am pretty forgiving when it comes to that. I only speak one language, English, and anyone that has even made the attempt to learn English has respect from me for it.

Translating things from Japanese to English can result in quite the horror show, but, it is what it is. As long as I can get a faint grasp of what is going on, even a bad translation is better than no translation.

Things that give away a translation to me, is things like misspelled words, poor grammar in places, or improper use of punctuation. I don't complain about it since I can easily screw things up in my own native language. Though, it does give me a laugh now and then to see a translation that just comes across odd. (Insert 'All your base are belong to us' meme)

 

[LfkCn]

I'm biased against it because almost everything translated is Japanese, and their writing generally sucks ass to begin with.

The English in this thread is pretty much flawless from what I'm reading, and it would be good enough for me to enjoy in a game.

I'm really glad to hear that

Personally, I don't have any problems with AI translations, but I am pretty forgiving when it comes to that. I only speak one language, English, and anyone that has even made the attempt to learn English has respect from me for it.

Translating things from Japanese to English can result in quite the horror show, but, it is what it is. As long as I can get a faint grasp of what is going on, even a bad translation is better than no translation.

Things that give away a translation to me, is things like misspelled words, poor grammar in places, or improper use of punctuation. I don't complain about it since I can easily screw things up in my own native language. Though, it does give me a laugh now and then to see a translation that just comes across odd. (Insert 'All your base are belong to us' meme)

I hope other people think the same way as you.

 

[Zoe Archangel]

I don't think I've played a chatgpt translated game, but I've seen a lot of Japanese to English machine translation in the past with less advanced programs. Historically Japanese translation struggles with omitted information like a dropped subject or a person's gender because MTL just goes line by line. However, I assume an LLM could be given enough context to provide a more accurate translation.

Another issue is repetition. A lot of Japanese media, at least the non-serious stuff, really likes to use buzzwords. If you've watched any anime, you're probably familiar with the word "baka." Baka generally means idiot/dummy/fool/moron and while English speakers would want to alternate between synonyms, most non-serious Japanese media would prefer to just use baka. Some other really common phrases that show up are "take responsibility" and "it can't be helped." These commonly used phrases can get really annoying in a direct translation, but since LLM's can take instructions, you could direct it to avoid anticipated repetition in your initial request.

 

[Qahlz]

IMHO most machine translations from Japanese to English aren't very good and should at least be proof-read by a native English speaker. LLMs might be better, but I don't think I've yet read any decent translations made with LLMs - although I'm not saying they don't exist. Chances are that I read one and just didn't notice because it was good enough to pass as a human translation.

Some of the more egregious errors in machine translations are wrong pronouns. That goes from simple stuff, like the translator not knowing whether the adressed person is male or female and just going with either one (or in really bad cases, switching from sentence to sentence), but also has some more "advanced" localization issues where someone will adress another character by their name when speaking directly to them (e.g. "I'm sure Mr Smith has no issue with this" when only you and the other character are present). In those cases a proper localization should probably drop the third person and turn it into a regular second person pronoun, as I don't think talking to someone in the third person is a thing in English.
And then there's also some issues where a word's meaning can change depending on context. E.g. I've been playing eraMakaiRanch, and the girls regularly exclaim "No, please don't look at my milk~~~" when you uncover their chest - even if they aren't lactating yet. From what I've seen from before that line was translated, the word wrongly translated here can mean both "milk" and "breasts", and the translator simply used the default google translation for that part, without looking at the context. Not sure if an LLM would've picked up on that either, because the file just contains line after line of reactions by the female characters and to know the context you'd probably have to play the game and trigger that specific line.

 

[LfkCn]

IMHO most machine translations from Japanese to English aren't very good and should at least be proof-read by a native English speaker. LLMs might be better, but I don't think I've yet read any decent translations made with LLMs - although I'm not saying they don't exist. Chances are that I read one and just didn't notice because it was good enough to pass as a human translation.

Some of the more egregious errors in machine translations are wrong pronouns. That goes from simple stuff, like the translator not knowing whether the adressed person is male or female and just going with either one (or in really bad cases, switching from sentence to sentence), but also has some more "advanced" localization issues where someone will adress another character by their name when speaking directly to them (e.g. "I'm sure Mr Smith has no issue with this" when only you and the other character are present). In those cases a proper localization should probably drop the third person and turn it into a regular second person pronoun, as I don't think talking to someone in the third person is a thing in English.
And then there's also some issues where a word's meaning can change depending on context. E.g. I've been playing eraMakaiRanch, and the girls regularly exclaim "No, please don't look at my milk~~~" when you uncover their chest - even if they aren't lactating yet. From what I've seen from before that line was translated, the word wrongly translated here can mean both "milk" and "breasts", and the translator simply used the default google translation for that part, without looking at the context. Not sure if an LLM would've picked up on that either, because the file just contains line after line of reactions by the female characters and to know the context you'd probably have to play the game and trigger that specific line.

To avoid such issues, I translate sentence by sentence instead of translating an entire text of thousands of words at once. In some specific cases, when I provide information like "a man and a woman are talking right now" or "this is the situation here," ChatGPT does a really good job.

Still, I feel like if I were trying to translate from Japanese to English, I would run into all sorts of problems no matter what. Luckily, translations from my native language to English are much more successful.

 

[tanstaafl]

Translated games now are leaps and bounds better than translated games five or so years ago. I guess my tolerance for those in the past has made me not mind the newer ones near as much.