I Became a Childhood Friend of a Mid-Level Boss - Ch. 27

Dex-chan lover
Joined
Apr 12, 2024
Messages
75
What’s the difference between TL and MTL if you don’t mind me asking? I’m newer to the manga/LN community (like four months maybe) so I’m not familiar with the term yet

MTL is Machine TransLation. Think Google Translate or DeepL. A lot of times it'll fail to parse correctly and you end up with awkward sentences. For example, the name "Haneul" may get translated directly into "sky" or "heaven" because it's bad at distinguishing what is a name and what isn't.

TL is done by actual humans that are aware of the context. Normally, they won't mistranslate names as words. Of course, this is totally dependent on the human's mastery of both languages.
 
Group Leader
Joined
Apr 16, 2018
Messages
11
What’s the difference between TL and MTL if you don’t mind me asking? I’m newer to the manga/LN community (like four months maybe) so I’m not familiar with the term yet
Tl = Translation (TransLation); Done by humans
MTL = Machine Translation; Done by a machine, like Google Translate

MTL tends to be lower quality than TL, and is usually marred by a great deal of issues so many refuse to read it. That said, there are bad TLs too.

NovelUpdates only lists chapters from normal non-paywalled TLs.
 
Fed-Kun's army
Joined
Jun 6, 2024
Messages
33
MTL is Machine TransLation. Think Google Translate or DeepL. A lot of times it'll fail to parse correctly and you end up with awkward sentences. For example, the name "Haneul" may get translated directly into "sky" or "heaven" because it's bad at distinguishing what is a name and what isn't.

TL is done by actual humans that are aware of the context. Normally, they won't mistranslate names as words. Of course, this is totally dependent on the human's mastery of both languages.
Tl = Translation (TransLation); Done by humans
MTL = Machine Translation; Done by a machine, like Google Translate

MTL tends to be lower quality than TL, and is usually marred by a great deal of issues so many refuse to read it. That said, there are bad TLs too.

NovelUpdates only lists chapters from normal non-paywalled TLs.
Thak you both for the information! Just opened MangaDex, and especially the forums, after a few days so i hadn't seen this before now
 
Dex-chan lover
Joined
Nov 18, 2019
Messages
372
Thak you both for the information! Just opened MangaDex, and especially the forums, after a few days so i hadn't seen this before now
Another thing to note is that a competent TL team will often do extra work to localize or explain puns, idioms, and slang. Typically with a note somewhere about it. The very best ones will also include stuff about locations and cultural context.

MTL doesn't do that. It tends to be very very literal and as the others pointed out, is often confidently wrong. (I'm also not certain if rule 1.7 forbids all mtl from mangadex or only the ones with automatic typesetting etc of the translation)
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Top