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INTEREST: Manga Plus Editor Explains Why Shonen Jump+ Handles Overseas Distribution In-House


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Aylon2



Joined: 03 Jan 2022
Posts: 11
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 3:17 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
he explained that the priority is making a manga's official version as easily accessible as possible

Yeah, I don't know about that considering the recent fiasco with Ayakashi Triangle.
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Nanashi.no.mono



Joined: 09 Jan 2022
Posts: 8
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 3:24 pm Reply with quote
Jesus Christ, here they come again with those delusional ideas of switching to machine translation... As a translator, it's always sooo nice to hear that... (that's sarcasm, for those who didn't get it)

I'm very lucky to work with a publisher that pays me properly but I can't say the same about plenty of translators also associated with manga publishing companies. Yet those measly salaries are still addressed as a high expense that should be cut short as soon as possible... Talk about a letdown... Guess I should make plans to find a different job within 10 years...

They should give machine translation a try, though, since they're so keen about it. I'm sure the readers will make their voices heard through their wallets.
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Blanchimont



Joined: 25 Feb 2012
Posts: 3573
Location: Finland
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 3:47 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
Shueisha's MANGA Plus service and Viz Media's Shonen Jump website both revealed last week that they are not publishing the 74th chapter of Kentaro Yabuki's Ayakashi Triangle manga. Neither service listed a reason for the skipped chapter. Both services will publish the manga's 75th chapter on January 16.

No worries, by this point most readers likely already found and read the fan-translated version of said chapter...

Machine translation? No. With such a context heavy language like Japanese? No way no how. Not even in 10 years.
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ThatMoonGuy



Joined: 13 Oct 2017
Posts: 364
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 4:33 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
He said that the quality of machine translation is still very low, but that "in 10 years it should improve," adding that "if we can produce high-quality translations in many different languages, it will be a game-changer all over again."


People've been saying this since the early days of Chomsky. Neural Networks and Deep Learning software are the fad right now but I don't see that going much of anywhere, really. Language is a social fact and machines don't get that.
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SHD



Joined: 05 Apr 2015
Posts: 1759
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 5:01 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
He said that the quality of machine translation is still very low, but that "in 10 years it should improve," adding that "if we can produce high-quality translations in many different languages, it will be a game-changer all over again."

As someone who works with machine translation daily...
HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
that was funny Very Happy

That being said, as much as I abhor the idea of MT being applied to creative translation, and would very much like to believe that readers would be against it, sadly my experience is that most people really don't care, apparently, as long as they have a general idea of what's going on in a story - and that is regardless of whether that general idea is actually accurate or not.

I mean, for one there are all those fan translations of manga and light novels that might as well be machine translations because they're either "translated" by someone who barely even speaks the source language and may or may not have a good command of English, or are, in fact, Google Translate with some minor post-editing thrown in. Similarly with fan translations of lyrics, audio drama, etc. by people who don't seem to be able to interpret a text as a coherent whole, but just go sentence by sentence without understanding them in context. And sure, you can argue that these are free and so expectations are low and there's no real accountability. You're getting it for free so you've no right to complain.

But then there are things like the English edition of the Legend of the Galactic Heroes novels - I've read only the first two volumes because after that I refused to pay for what read like someone's rough first draft. I could barely make it through each book. Clunky, switching between overly literal and painfully inept attempts at creativity, no sense of style whatsoever, no coherence, just words after words, sentences after sentences. To say nothing about the typos, inconsistencies, mistranslations. (And then reviewers even here at ANN blamed Tanaka Yoshiki, as if he wrote the novel in English...) These flaws are glaring to someone like me, but then I keep seeing people saying "nah, I didn't notice any issues" "I thought it was fine" "I guess you're right but it didn't bother me" etc.

So honestly, I'm not being terribly optimistic.
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BlueAlf



Joined: 02 Jan 2017
Posts: 1555
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 6:03 pm Reply with quote
Reading the article genuinely made me happy until it came to the part about machine translation. Is the cost of translation really that expensive? If that's so, I wonder why they not focus on just English translations until the readership grows?

Nevertheless, I'd still thank Shueisha for taking this step. They've always been the one that's looking forward the most compared to other manga publishers. Even more if the cost of translating and editing really is that much of a burden for their wallets.
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SHD



Joined: 05 Apr 2015
Posts: 1759
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 6:08 pm Reply with quote
BlueAlf wrote:
Is the cost of translation really that expensive?

It's not, it's just the only expense that they can cut back on, because it's not going in the "right" pockets, and there's always a way to make it even cheaper. Quality is either not a real concern, or an expectation regardless of rates.

(Source: works in the industry.)
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RoninX



Joined: 03 Aug 2016
Posts: 40
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 6:38 pm Reply with quote
They cancelled Red Hood even those Western audiences left thousands of comments to let it find its footing.
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Gem-Bug



Joined: 10 Nov 2018
Posts: 1326
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 7:35 pm Reply with quote
Aylon2 wrote:
Quote:
he explained that the priority is making a manga's official version as easily accessible as possible

Yeah, I don't know about that considering the recent fiasco with Ayakashi Triangle.


"Fiasco".

Quote:
He said that the quality of machine translation is still very low, but that "in 10 years it should improve," adding that "if we can produce high-quality translations in many different languages, it will be a game-changer all over again."


By that token why even bother with mangaka at all? Get AI-generated stories and art, see how far that gets them. Rolling Eyes
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09jcg



Joined: 19 Sep 2006
Posts: 537
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 8:03 pm Reply with quote
Gem-Bug wrote:
Aylon2 wrote:
Quote:
he explained that the priority is making a manga's official version as easily accessible as possible

Yeah, I don't know about that considering the recent fiasco with Ayakashi Triangle.


"Fiasco".

Fiasco seems an appropriate word for it, especially considering they delisted the collected/uncensored editions from US market places. The amount of comments the news article generated on ANN seems to indicate quite a few people arent pleased with how theyre handling AT.
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BadNewsBlues



Joined: 21 Sep 2014
Posts: 6338
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 8:12 pm Reply with quote
BlueAlf wrote:
Reading the article genuinely made me happy until it came to the part about machine translation. Is the cost of translation really that expensive? If that's so, I wonder why they not focus on just English translations until the readership grows?


That’s going to be a hell of a wait depending on how niche the book is.

RoninX wrote:
They cancelled Red Hood even those Western audiences left thousands of comments to let it find its footing.


If the Japanese audience wasn’t going to wait for that to happen then it was pretty much doomed.
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KarlFranz



Joined: 17 Jun 2019
Posts: 186
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 9:59 pm Reply with quote
RoninX wrote:
They cancelled Red Hood even those Western audiences left thousands of comments to let it find its footing.


Red Hood was a directionless mess. The only thing that it have going for is the THICC girls design. Also the problem here is who gonna pay the author? Even MangaPlus doesn't generate much revenue after you subtract all the cost so the author pay is still tie to the physical copes print and sale which isn't good in Red Hood case.
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LegitPancake



Joined: 26 Jun 2017
Posts: 1311
Location: Texas, USA
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 10:28 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
While MANGA Plus is free to download and use, users can also purchase compiled book volumes for specific manga.

Umm, MangaPlus has never allowed purchasing of volumes or intermediate chapters. That’s a Viz/Shonen Jump thing.
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liatris



Joined: 28 May 2019
Posts: 67
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 11:09 pm Reply with quote
It seems unpopular here, but I'm sure machine translation will be the game changer.

If we can use higher performance machine translation, translators will definitely be able to translate faster than they are now. The attempt has already begun.
It will surely bring a large amount of works outside Japan.
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AmpersandsUnited



Joined: 22 Mar 2012
Posts: 633
PostPosted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 11:39 pm Reply with quote
liatris wrote:
It seems unpopular here, but I'm sure machine translation will be the game changer.

If we can use higher performance machine translation, translators will definitely be able to translate faster than they are now. The attempt has already begun.
It will surely bring a large amount of works outside Japan.


People got by on DUWANG and broken bootleg Honk Kong DVD subs. I think fans are more resilient to... less-than-perfect translations shall we say than people give them credit for.

RoninX wrote:
They cancelled Red Hood even those Western audiences left thousands of comments to let it find its footing.


Which western audience though? The article in particular cites France's publication of Kaiju no 6 which was 250,000. A few thousand comments isn't that comparable to actual sales numbers.
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