Also this is a manga thread now. I will go with Oyasumi Punpun as one of the best mangas I have ever read ;)) and I recommend it to you all. Dont look up anything about it just read :)
There's way too much nuance in both Korean and Japanese for this to reliably work. Chinese, from my limited study is a bit closer to English in grammar and structure so that might work
But you trust scanlation groups? Neither will give you perfect, professional-level translations.
>Chinese, from my limited study is a bit closer to English in grammar and structure so that might work
Mandarin is full of nuance, and it's no closer to English than Japanese is. It has the Subject-Object-Verb grammar structure, just like Japanese and Korean.
I often prefer fan level over professional level because they are targeting different audience. As far as quality goes, there is a range and sometimes I skip something because the quality is too low, but I see plenty that does a good enough job.
Part of it is that there is no such thing as a perfect translation because there isn't an exact equivalent in another language. For someone with no knowledge of the original culture or language, there is some translations that will probably work best, but the more one knows about the language and culture, even a small amount picked up just from consuming other items, the the more likely a different translation works better. For a definite concrete example, how should one handle honorifics like chan, san, and kun.
This isn’t correct from what I’ve studied in both Japanese and Mandarin.
https://lptranslations.com/learn/chinese-vs-japanese/#:~:tex...
> For example, Chinese verbs are not conjugated and only have one form, whereas Japanese verbs have a wide range of conjugations and particles. Plus, Chinese is an SVO (Subject+Verb+Object) language just like English, so sentences are easier to make and interpret. Vice versa, Japanese is an SOV (Subject+Object+Verb) language, meaning you do not say: "I eat sushi" but "I sushi eat".
Mandarin often moves the object to the front for emphasis, creating an OSV or SOV structure (e.g., 寿司你吃, "Sushi, you eat" or 你寿司吃了吗 "You sushi eaten?"). This isn’t true SOV grammar but highlights how meaning shifts through word order in ways English can’t replicate without rephrasing.
The nuance in Mandarin often comes from particles that take on very different meanings depending on how they are used (e.g. 了, 的) and contextual cues rather than conjugation. For instance, 吃 "eat" becomes past tense with 了 (吃了), future with 会 (会吃), or continuous with 在 (在吃)—no verb changes needed. But if you say 要吃了, it actually means future tense of "will eat soon"!
Meanwhile, Japanese relies heavily on verb conjugations (食べる→食べた) and postpositional particles (は, を) to mark grammatical roles, in a way making its structure more rigid and easier to interpret. Personally I found Tae Kim's interpretation of "Japanese isn't SOV, it's actually V!" to be useful.
Both languages share subject-drop tendencies (like omitting "I" or "you" when contextually clear), and compound-word formation in both languages from the use of Chinese characters (kanji) adds another layer of contextual interpretation.
Just because neither are perfect doesn't mean they are equally bad, though.
Not in manga space, but Microsoft had been notorious for nonchalantly shipping crazy MTL errors for past 3-5 years, e.g. "Copilot Child Adoption Kit", "Reply in cost estimate", or "Print in scenery". For manga and entertainments, more likely modes of errors would be wildly fluctuating pronouns, genders, personas, formalities almost in styles of Monty Python satire.
These are less likely to manifest with language pairs that are closer together like English and German, and less likely with human translators who can trivially go through pages to read with full context and/or write with consistency.
For a while now my coworkers have been free of charge when they're available. It's pretty insane
For old translation systems, you are absolutely right though.
And context isn't always clear. It depends on where the conversation is taking place, where the speaker is looking, where speech bubbles are positioned, and if the author intends to mislead readers, the information necessary to understand the context might even be revealed in future episodes.
The fact of the matter is there's going to be some nuance lost in even a good human translation. For example as far as I can tell in Korean martial arts novels a word is used which can mean either "demonic" or "unorthodox" to describe a group in opposition to the "orthodox" martial artists and a human translator has to basically pick one and go with it removing whatever nuance is in the original.
I'd prefer an official translation of course but the AI one is "good enough" if none is available.
Formal vs informal speech is another thing that doesn't seem to translate- but I don't think you need to understand every nuance to enjoy what is in many cases a straightforward genre story.
Manga is much trickier since the AI if reading the page may not be able to pull from the context of other pages the way it could in a novel.
I think it might be a tad premature to say it's over for them.
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, one of the more recent lightnovels I've been reading (via "Slime Reader") has an extremely noticeable drop in quality when they moved to machine translations (and that's with post-translation editing).
However, the speed at which things can be translated is a huge positive, and I'm sure translation tech will get better, so it's probably just a matter of time.
I have always had huge respect for both manga and anime translation groups.