From the article:
The app will utilize Mantra’s AI-assisted translation system. Mantra is the service that is providing AI translation for the simultaneous English releases of Kore Yamazaki’s The Ancient Magus’ Bride and Ghost and Witch manga. Shogakukan invested in Mantra in June.
Also, I found this bit interesting. Will be curious to see what this ends up looking like and if the AI will mess this up:
The releases will also include word balloons with icons of the characters to display characters’ lines, as Shogakukan told Nikkei it has received feedback that “Japanese names are hard to remember.”
I know AI translation is improving in many cases, but this feels like it’s going to go badly.
A lot of people will barely put up with MTL on free sites, and there are more than enough properly translated works out there as alternatives that there isn’t a reason to put up with bad translation. I can see the service bombing pretty badly. But if it doesn’t bomb we then see a justification for flooding the market with lower quality works.
I don’t think AI translation is at a point where this doesn’t look like a lose-lose situation. It’s just testing to see whether the market can be enshittified in a profitable way.
I’m really hoping this absolutely falls off a cliff with respect to sales numbers.
I’m interested in the quality of the translation. I hope this service doesn’t just use the AI translation as is. I use AI translations for my work and it became really good in the last 2 years or so with little additional human correction necessary. But an editorial pass is still necessary even if it’s just a little.
That being said I only ever worked with generalized models and who knows how feasible a specialized model can be for this task. And whatever the result will be, the simple fact is that it’s only getting better from that point on. So I’m looking forward to (timely) access to a lot more light novels in the future.
Funny I was sketching up a project to do just this after tracking down a HORRIBLE MTL for a LN I want to read.
All the LMM powered options still require editing and corrections.
We’re definitely not there yet for this to be fully automated. AI assisted would be OK.
Nononononononononononononono what the fuck
