I recently reviewed a manga that had been translated from Japanese into Swedish using “AI”. I do not know what tool had been used, I only know it was referenced as “AI”. The translation was very understandable and better than I had expected, but as I really started delving into it, there were some errors that required a pair of human eyes to first identify and then correct.
Translations being too literal:
For instance, “kawaii” is often translated as “cute”. In this context though, it had nothing to do with the looks of someone but rather that the person was the “teacher’s pet”. There were quite a few examples of this throughout the text, including a metaphor that did sound rather strange once translated literally to Swedish.
Incorrect or no subject:
Anyone who knows a bit of Japanese is aware that there can be several sentences without a subject. Sometimes AI added the wrong subject, or left it out completely, rendering the sentence somewhat difficult to understand in Swedish.
“It” in Swedish can be either “den” or “det”. The default seemed to be “det” even when it should have been “den”. A similar mistake was when AI referred to a person mentioned a couple pages back, when it seemed to default to “him” even when it was a “her”.
Not realising the importance of cultural references:
There were several scenarios where a native reader would understand straight away what was going on by looking at the images. A Swedish reader, not familiar with all things Japanese, may not have been able to interpret all of these and I ended up adding a few clarifications.
In summary, the reader would have been able to understand the manga reasonably well but, in my mind, the translation was not good enough to use straight off.
It is much quicker to start with an AI translation than starting from scratch though and no doubt there will be further improvements in the AI tools. For now, though, a human in the loop is still very much needed!
View a discussion about manga and AI translations on Youtube through the link below:
Madeleine Olausson in conversation with Maya Matsuoka on Japan Expert Insight