The chapters are AI-translated, so obviously some people don’t like them altho I can read them just fine But what people are actually pissed about is the multiple uploads of the same chapters by different scan groups and then these scanlation teams having their own sites where they put chapters behind a paywall like they are the official release...like bro we’re already reading this shit illegally because we can’t buy the official chapters, and now you want us to PAY YOU for it??
fr they do everything they can to make us suscribe to their paywall ai website
well, while i do agree with your point, i actually read a lot of mtl’d novels and cultivation manhuas, and i don’t know if you’ve experienced this yourself, but mtl’d cultivation manhuas are the peak of slop translations. it’s genuinely something that leaves you brain-dead. the names of characters change every two sentences, and since cultivation stories have so many different realms, tiers, places and all that, with the names constantly changing, it becomes almost impossible to follow the plot. you don’t know who they’re talking about or what they’re talking about even after reading 400 chapters, and generally these stories have hundreds and hundreds more, so your brain just melts halfway through. everyone’s gender also keeps getting mistranslated. i swear, i once read a novel and only near the end found out that my favorite female character had actually been a guy this whole time because the pronouns had been mistranslated (╬￣皿￣)凸
but the thing is, with those kinds of poor translations, you miss an important part of the story even when you can understand the general meaning, that's the dialogue. dialogue is really important for storytelling because different characters can speak in completely different ways and mean different things even when they’re saying roughly the same thing. so much nuance is lost if it isn’t carefully translated. even if you can understand the mtl, you might still be missing deeper meanings if the translation is poor. (literary translation research has also found that machine and AI translation can interfere with meaning, pronouns, style, cultural context, and other discourse-level elements rather than simply producing awkward wording. i read a paper published in a UFMG journal about this just the other day lol) (⊙…⊙ )
but that’s not even my main issue with it. i think that’s still totally acceptable because it’s a free translation after all, so you shouldn’t expect too much. the problem is that you don’t know how much you can actually trust it.
recently, i was reading an mtl’d novel and noticed that the characters were acting a bit out of character in one chapter. so i went and bought the original novel on ridibooks, and found out that the chapter i had read had basically been rewritten by the ai. it wasn’t just translated badly, it was a completely new plot with the characters doing things that weren’t in the original story at all. (the novel was "the god of adlibs," chapter 37 on anubis scans)
and that’s one of the biggest issues with mtl, and it can happen with manhwa translations too. the problem with a poor translation isn’t just that you might not understand what’s being said, because like you said, you can often infer that from context. it’s that even if you do understand it, there’s no guarantee that it was actually what was written in the original. sometimes even human translators can mistranslate something and change its meaning, after all. but if the translation isn’t being done by someone who is actually reading the story and understands what is happening in it, whether it’s mtl or human-translated, it can make the whole thing pretty much unreadable for me. ┑(￣Д ￣)┍
Am I just too smart? (｡•ᴗ-)✧
No no, but a lot of times I'll be reading the comments of a story and I'll see countless friends complaining about the translation.. meanwhile I read it just fine, this happens so much to the point I scroll back through sometimes to see if theres some poor wording or something?
Yes sometimes theres mistaken pronouns (most commonly because the original language doesn't have special pronoun distinction.) or there's issues with a sentence's wording or something.
But that's all stuff that I found easy to understand via the surrounding context (^～^;)ゞ, so easy in fact I didn't have any issues reading it and even failed to see the problem a few times without rereading several times whilst looking for errors.
(´ . . . `) My sanity is crumbling, is it auctally hard to read these translations or are most simply overreacting hoping for the next Shakespeare whilst giving the translator mere crumbs at best?
I'm not talking about issues with posting where its blurry or the translation is overlapping the original language. (Although I can tend to read those pretty decently as well, or at the least get a gist • ‿ ,•) I'm merely talking about the translation itself, the wording and such.
Honestly I'd simply take this as overreactions or even something akin to entitlement and seeking quality of the gods whilst giving practically no suitable sustainable things, but at one point in my youth I did test positively well in my reading level, so I simply haven't the faintest clue as to if this is just my reading comprehension talking or if it's auctally not difficult to read and people are simply very vocal about minor inconveniences here;;;
Then again, I suppose a lot of people here learned English to read the storylines, so perhaps that could be a motivator as to why the translation is a big complaint, as I'm sure their English comprehension may suffer a tad at context clues. ╮(. ❛ ᴗ ❛.)╭ Oh well, who knows!