This is actually one of the best use cases of LLM.

No, it’s quite simply not. At all.

LLM is an entirely statistical model. To the degree that it strings words together in an order that makes some sort of sense, it’s ONLY because those words are statistically likely to be strung together in that order.

Japanese is an extremely imprecise and contextual language, particularly in its written form. Most kanji have multiple meanings, and often even a notably wide range of meanings, so a purely statistical model is already handicapped in any attempt to translate the intended meaning to another language. And Japanese creative writing, and manga especially, depends heavily on deliberately unusual uses of specific kanji to convey subtle bits of background information, moods, attitudes, hidden meanings or the like, or just as wordplay - puns, alliteration and the like.

And LLMs have no way to recognize any of that nuance. All they can do is regurgitate the most statistically likely string of words.

That will likely provide tolerable results with something that’s written simply and straightforwardly, but as soon as it gets to any of the countless manga that rely on unusual kanji readings and wordplay to convey nuance, it’s going to utterly and completely fail, since it has and can have no actual understanding of the author’s intent, so no basis on which to choose the correct reading of the kanji. All it can do is regurgitate the most statistically likely one, which in those sorts of cases is the one that’s absolutely guaranteed to be wrong.

I contributed to TVTropes in the early days, and quit after they banned Lotte no Omocha, At the time, it wasn’t so much because of any concern for that or any other specific thing, but just because the way it all went down empowered a regime of prigs and assholes.

…the company’s efforts appear to be yielding results, as evidenced by the successful takedowns and ongoing legal actions against major piracy sites.

I just wonder who they’re trying to convince here.

There have been piracy sites on the internet pretty much from day one.

And the biggest ones have gotten taken down pretty much from day two.

And new ones keep popping up.

The internet might be the new god, and Lain might be its messiah.

…to streamline thier efforts.

That’s the key. MTL can absolutely serve as part of the process, but it needs a significant amount of human editing to end up with a good translation.

And if history is anything to go by, the publishers aren’t going to be willing to invest the necessary time and resources to do it right, and instead they’ll just half-ass it, and it’ll entirely justifiably fail.

My approach to the matter has been very simple and straightforward - I have nothing at all to do with any of the .ml communities. I never even set foot in any of them. And I heartily recommend that others do the same - just pretend that the .ml communities don’t exist and focus entirely on this instance and its vastly superior communities.

Time is on our side. These communities are simply better, in all possible ways, so all we really have to do is keep doing what we do here, completely ignore .ml, and be patient.

Sorry - that whole thing just ended up roo rant-y for my tastes, so I deleted it.

Broadly, for those coming into the thread, it was about the asshole translators and their asshole employers who insist on “localizing” literally everything, including culture-specific things like honorifics that cannot ever actually be “localized.”

And yes - eliminating lgbt issues is another problem. That one particularly irritates me because it’s an issue regarding which the Japanese, traditionalists though they might be, are very open and tolerant - there have been lgbt characters in anime and manga, entirely non-contoversially, for as long as the mediums have existed. Then along come the Americans, who get all twisted out of shape over it.

And not only that, but the boring cardboard elf chick he claims to love explicitly asked him to do exactly and only one thing - to stay at home and not butt into things in the city - so what does he do? He rushes off to butt into things in the city, and fucks up literally everything for literally everyone.

I could never really get into Steins;Gate, mostly because pretty much every time the MC opened his mouth, I wanted to punch him.

I’d say that the greatest sci-fi anime, mecha or not, is Cowboy Bebop. A pretty mundane answer, but it just is what it is.

My personal favorite is probably Kaiba. I’m also especially partial to Trigun (including Stampede), Ergo Proxy and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. And I feel like I shouldn’t let this go without mentioning Now and Then, Here and There, Casshern Sins, Darker Than Black and Aria. And a couple of cheesy gems that aren’t even close to the greatest that I just happen to like - Estab-Life and Photon: The Idiot Adventures.

As is always the case, all publishers need to do is look at the scanlation community to see how things will or will not work, since the scanlators are already doing, for free, what the publishers hope to do for profit. Whatever problems exist and whatever solutions there are to those problems, the scanlators have already discovered.

And if they would only do that, they would discover, for instance, that MTL, presented as a finished product on its own, is so blatantly crappy that it’s essentislly universally derided, with the only split being between the people who might grudgingly tolerate it in a specific case and the people who reject it outright.

There’s no need for the JAT to argue that case when vivid proof that they’re right already exists in virtually every comment section of every machine translated manga.

But instead, the publishers consistently make choices that any halfway decent scanlator could tell them are going to fail to appeal to the fans, which choices then - surprise surprise - fail to appeal to the fans.