Okay, I'm going to say something because I didn't know you'd come back. I thought you had learned your lesson and moved on with your life, scanning books and so on. It's just a coincidence that I've found out you've come back. I don't mean to blast you on the spot; that's not why I'm saying this. But I also feel it's disrespectful of you to come back when you know you're not a real Japanese translator. You're here telling people that your translations aren't made with 'Generative AI', when you're literally a Google translator and you've admitted to me that you're a Google translator and that you don't have the 'mental capacity' to learn Japanese. While I'm fine with anyone doing whatever they want, this is after all a crazy community where anything can happen.
But the fact that you keep lying to yourself and to everyone just to chase clout is utterly astounding, Kiyan. I would have appreciated it more if you had told people the truth: that you are a Google translator who uses multiple machine translation sites and can't actually learn Japanese. Lying and saying that none of the series you're doing are machine translated isn't the way to go about things. You mention 'stealing thunder', but that makes no sense because this isn't stealing thunder; it's basically lying to the whole planet so you can make friends based on a skill you don't really have. Or just to say you're the guy who brought the series out. And no, this isn't an attempt to bully you. I used what you told me in the past to prove that what you did was wrong. It should never have been done in the first place, by you or by anyone else, for that matter.
What you said to me was one of the most insulting things I've ever heard in a profession where I've dedicated my life to restoring legitimacy to books translated by people with genuine skills. With that said, this is what I said publicly about you, at a Q&A when people asked me a particular question about machine translators, I thought this was so good, I used it, cause you couldn't make this up even if you tried to, this was around the start of last year.
(I asked Kiyan, a guy I knew a while ago, how he translated things, because what I had read of his work was inaccurate and I knew he had used machine translation. He was honest with me and said he used image captures, Google Translate, and online dictionaries. And I told him, "You shouldn't do that, it's either you legit know Japanese or it's nothing." Then I told him, "Which is more natural, a person who actually knows the language, or a person who cheats?" Then he says this, "I was under the impression that there could be such thing as a middle ground between a machine translator and a real one, guess not." I showed him a comparison of the Mega Man translation and he tried to justify his approach by saying, "Your translation is obviously worded much better, but the meaning, the information being conveyed, hasn't actually changed between your version & the machine translated version." I legitimately laughed because it's as if he didn't see how wrong the other translation was. It was completely Google translated and entirely wrong. Anyone can point out all the mistakes in it. Is he really in that much denial? Just when I thought it couldn't get any stupider, he said this to me. It was like he was saying "fuck you" to me, but nicely. He said, "But while I’m here, I hope this doesn’t come across as me disregarding your points, but I just wanna give my perspective, that the bare minimum requirement for translating something is maintain the information being conveyed by a line, & to maintain its tone, & there are many different routes one can take towards that same destination, some obviously better than others, so when I translate stuff I consider it to be trying to find the ideal route with any given line, I hope I phrased all that right.", I basically told him that's an embarrassment to the art of translation, and extremely disrespectful to the real guy's who bust their asses to do this kinda work, and after a while he came to a realization that he was wrong for what he was doing, and that he "saw the damage he's done", and he stopped translating and it ended there.)
No, Kiyan, the bare minimum requirement isn't that. Machine translation and knowing a language are two entirely different things. A machine can't convey what a human understands and knows better than a machine can. You know this; I know you can't be that much of an idiot. You're basically taking a machine translation, editing it slightly, and then claiming to know a language. When in reality, you don't know anything. Don't lie and say you learnt Japanese overnight because you proved that you were incapable of learning the language. For as long as I've known you, you've always used Google Translate and continue to lie to everyone about it. It's great to be a fan of people's work, and I'm all for you sharing the raws of these series for a credible translator to work on. But you're still, and always will be, a Google translator. I read some of those chapters, and they were embellished so much that you basically wrote inaccurate lines and made them far more outlandish than they were. It reaked of machine translation. You know, an old friend once told me something, so I'll tell what he said. "You can polish a turd, but at the end of the day it's still a piece of shit".
