Yancha Gal no Anjou-san - Vol. 14 Ch. 175 - Flight Response Scramble

[dsfargeg]

I mean... seeing how bad official localization and translation are when done the old ways, it can't be worse... And those fuckers who botch and and change stories deserve to lose their jobs to AI

I agree and don't understand why "People who do their job badly on purpose should be replaced" is such a controversial take.

 

[the_Bear_from_Bearcave]

I don't disagree with that, and I ain't saying AI is the best thing ever, just that current day localizer brought it on themselves by bastardising works they were supposed to translate but decided to impose their views and opinions on it...
Maybe it will serve as a wake-up call to get more serious people doing the job correctly, that would be the best thing

There is still a ton of perfectly fine translators translating a ton of manga everyday, you can usually even avoid the ones you dislike just like you can avoid bad anime adaptation by shitty studios. Look how much work was needed to try to bring Cipher Academy to English speakers, one translator got burned out doing so.

And how many of the thousands of officially translated manga titles are so awfully bastardized? You sound just like ACAB folks here, few bad high profile cases condemns a whole career field. People who already do a good job don't need to have "wake up call", and those who don't are doing it for ideological reasons. And the people who could fire bad translators are the ones who hire AI companies instead of good translators, and we've already seen few results where AI translated manga or subtitles are awful.

In some cases it was unclear if bad subtitles are fault of AI or just shitty outsourced company, which just underscores that the problem is not caring about quality in the first place, and using AI is not something you do when you care about quality, it's cheap and convenient, like outsourcing your phone support. Just hire good translators and pay them well, this is just equivalent of outsourcing on the cheap your phone support to some third world country where everyone speaks with heavily accented English, instead of paying for people who do a good job and are easy to understand.

AI translations is guaranteed to be worse than average translation. AI with human editor is good for stuff like manuals, where you can just check if translated instructions aren't fucked up and correct unclear sentences, it's shit for manga, where you have mostly short texts due to being visual medium, very dependent on current situation that's often implied by visual part of manga, like expressions, that AI can't see, almost all in first person, usually with originally specific speech type, like gyaru or keigo (formal) or archaic on purpose, tomboy's boku, glasses guy's watashi and all that jazz.

 

[KellikL]

Emaqi is the app, Orange is the company. I cannot disclose my sources, but it is being translated by a human. It is however edited by non-native english speakers, and the translator has very little input on those edits. Take that as you will.

I'll still buy official english because I think the author deserves to get paid, but man I wish we could cut out the middleman

 

[Belkin]

Can't wait to see inuyama's mom reaction to the baddie he bagged

 

[KellikL]

Also, bad translations = capitalism my dudes. No company in the history of ever puts quality before $$$. If an outsourcer promises to deliver mid quality cheaper, then that's who many publishers use...especially in nascent or developing markets where there isn't a huge ROI. The creative industry is even worse than many other industries because most publishing is controlled by the big 4 (used to be big 6 but they are "consolidating") and your local fav manga isn't looking to move huge volumes. Bros crying about capitalism because profit on their favorite localized series doesn't match the expected rate of return is hilarious to me. Crying about "agenda" and shit is just funny. You want better official translations? Throw money at the art until it blows up like other niche markets. Mainstream gets funded. Niche gets what it can get. Not saying that there aren't skilled translators doing god's work for these companies, but it's more of a crapshoot because of how the system works.

 

[dsfargeg]

Just hire good translators and pay them well, this is just equivalent of outsourcing on the cheap your phone support to some third world country where everyone speaks with heavily accented English, instead of paying for people who do a good job and are easy to understand.

AI with human editor is good for stuff like manuals, where you can just check if translated instructions aren't fucked up and correct unclear sentences

I want to focus on these lines in particular because they reveal a profound ignorance of how translation jobs actually work. Stuff like technical manuals, scientific studies, and legal papers are the extremely high-paying translation work. If someone is competent enough to do that work well, they do not want to translate games, manga, and anime. Anime already gets made on a deficit and most of the animators are making close to minimum wage despite that. Anime serves as an expensive advertisement for toys and other merch; it is almost never profitable by itself.

You're suggesting that they throw a lot of money that they mostly don't have to hire extremely expensive high-skill people to make anime even more unprofitable than it already is?

 

[buff730]

As a quick reminder, this got licensed… by an AI manga translation startup

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1807964236754321574

Normally I’d say to support the official release, and the author tweeted that they checked with Emaqi Orange and they're using a human translator, but… I trust them as much as I can throw them

The person I spoke to at the booth was actually a really big fan of Anjou-san and just wanted it to become more popular worldwide. He seemed pretty genuine. He was actually surprised that I actually knew about the series too. Hoping it turns out positive for the series.

 

[Endominus]

I mean... seeing how bad official localization and translation are when done the old ways, it can't be worse... And those fuckers who botch and and change stories deserve to lose their jobs to AI

Friend, you lack sufficient pessimism. It can always be worse.

No, I mean 90% of the drawing will be skipped and done by AI to create Animes. in-between animations all done by AI and some of the key animation based on manga. That will be 10x better than current cgi implementation

The current state of the art for AI-inbetweening is... not great. It might be easier to do in anime style rather than western animation, since while it is more detailed, anime is drawn more realistically and there are more "small movements" which that author concludes that the AI tech is better at. Given the rate of growth and innovation of AI startups, however, this might actually be solved in a few years.

 

[the_Bear_from_Bearcave]

I want to focus on these lines in particular because they reveal a profound ignorance of how translation jobs actually work. Stuff like technical manuals, scientific studies, and legal papers are the extremely high-paying translation work. If someone is competent enough to do that work well, they do not want to translate games, manga, and anime. Anime already gets made on a deficit and most of the animators are making close to minimum wage despite that. Anime serves as an expensive advertisement for toys and other merch; it is almost never profitable by itself.

You're suggesting that they throw a lot of money that they mostly don't have to hire extremely expensive high-skill people to make anime even more unprofitable than it already is?

Yeah, sure buddy, "ignorance". I said that AI can work relatively well there, because it's already used that way. Legal papers aren't AI translated AFAIK, but legal companies increasingly use AI to search and summarize the laws, instead of law interns doing all that work for senior employees. A lot of manuals for big companies like Microsoft are literally machine translated and displayed with notice that they might be imperfect, if you work in IT you see manuals for stuff like Azure management as MTL web pages in your language with option to display in original English, because that works well enough for IT stuff of companies using those services. So stop with your "extremely expensive high-skill people" when I see MTL instructions becoming the norm in IT. And even if the translators that still get work in IT are well paid, the point is that AI in such cases actually allows human translator to do more stuff quickly and well enough for the final consumer, because IT manuals have hundreds of pages that are mostly boring and easy to understand shit where AI does well enough that human can just browse and OK this, with much lower costs and work-time.

I don't now how the hell did you get anime companies hiring super expensive translators from other fields from that. Anime and manga business already employs translators, and they just need to keep those that do well and fire those that do badly. AI is in no way better than keeping and hiring people similar to those who already do good job for unfortunately low pay, and we shouldn't hope that they make anime even worse just so they can make it cheaper. You know what makes anime unprofitable? Taking a lot of projects on the cheap that they don't have enough staff for, not the translation business. And manga companies can absolutely afford to keep competent translators and hire similar ones, since the translation of manga into new language brings a lot of new customers, which should be enough to hire at least competent folks who are professional enough to not put their own spin on it.

 

[Panino]

I'll be surprised and annoyed if Inuyama's mom doesn't see Toyoda.
Also, did Anjou fought with her mother and want to ask Seto to stay at his house?

 

[Hikineet]

Thanks for the chapter.

 

[Cordonblue]

Instant simping for Inuyamama.

Girlfriends coming to get their boys out of their respective slumps.

 

[jojoka]

Seto could just become a researcher or something I guess if he just enjoys studying.

 

[Jmann]

Damn, i was sure and waiting for the "Toyoda meets Inuyama's mom and invite her in" moment.

 

[ebgeek]

"What career path do you want?"
"I don't know."
"Take this more seriously!"

Super helpful. Should've replied back with "Okay, I seriously don't know."

Seto could just become a researcher or something I guess if he just enjoys studying.

I thought this as well or go into some branch of history.

 

[Meowzilla]

Emaqi is the app, Orange is the company. I cannot disclose my sources, but it is being translated by a human. It is however edited by non-native english speakers, and the translator has very little input on those edits. Take that as you will.

Would you happen to know if they licensed it to do volume releases or if they’re just going to be releasing chapters on that app?

 

[Esper]

As long as this manga isn't following the dead end Chi & Tokio lack of relationship I am happy.

 

[stupid_chris]

Would you happen to know if they licensed it to do volume releases or if they’re just going to be releasing chapters on that app?

I didn't ask that specific question, so I'm not sure, but I don't believe Orange currently does any physical releases, and all Anjou promotion so far has been in relation to Emaqi. I do know that all of volume 1 is already translated though.

 

[dsfargeg]

I don't now how the hell did you get anime companies hiring super expensive translators from other fields from that.

Your exact words were "Just hire good translators and pay them well." Would you like to explain how hiring skilled people and paying them well doesn't cost a lot of money, or can we skip ahead to the part where you either admit your profound ignorance or ragequit the thread?

And manga companies can absolutely afford to keep competent translators and hire similar ones, since the translation of manga into new language brings a lot of new customers, which should be enough to hire at least competent folks who are professional enough to not put their own spin on it.

You seem to be implying here that the anime and manga industries have both a readily available pool of high-skill talent and that they can easily afford the costs of hiring them, but are deliberately choosing the least competent people possible out of... malice, perhaps? You think they're causing international brand damage from fake translations and a worse product because they hate making money?

Let me explain some simple economics: The talent pool for people that are good at translation is limited and cannot keep up with the amount of manga produced. Even if they chose to start paying manga translators more, this does not magically lead to the instantaneous creation of people fluent in two languages and especially not for extremely difficult languages like Japanese. To acquire that level of skill from translators, they would be directly competing with high-paying translation jobs over a limited number of people. In order to compete with the high-paying translation jobs, they would have to offer equal or better conditions, such as equal or better pay.
You cannot solve scarcity by throwing more money at the problem.

However, you can sometimes solve scarcity by developing new technology. The solution to a lack of fertilizer to grow crops wasn't "pay fertilizer producers more," it was "someone invents the Haber-Bosch process." Similarly, the manga industry is hoping that investing 3 billion into AI translation will result in something significantly more economically feasible.

 

[AntonSolo]

a two-pronged attack! progress on both couples?

Damn, just when things look dreary, double date attacks!!!