Hacker News Reader

Comment by tom___n | Hacker News Reader

This is the first time Dreamcast owners can play it in a more understandable way (and I don't understand why some users are boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the translation work, but that's beside the point). Playing SGGG, we can all see how brave Sega was at the time. I'm still shocked that Sony had such good marketing around the PS2 launch, so users could trust them to wait - and NOT buy - a Dreamcast. The Dreamcast had already great games (Jet Set Radio! MSR! Shenmue! RECV! and many more!), great online features, and its architecture was so well thought out.

View on HN

> and I don't understand why some users are boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the translation work, but that's beside the point

Segagaga has a ton of obscure, referential, meta humor that isn't easily translated to English. The "cleaned up machine translation" approach means that a lot of this is lost. Looking at some screenshots of the game, the script seems stiff and overly formal, much like how direct machine translation of Japanese text reads. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2jjromh55tf7pp7s4hsvurf4/po... Obviously it's better than nothing, but people are pissed off because the "edited machine translation" workflow leads to poor results, not because of some reflexive anti-AI bias or whatever.

i don't think the translators had any first hand experience with akiba culture of that time period, nor did they know how to speak japanese to actually research it (and most of those ezweb.ne.jp / imode sites are long gone)

Based on what I read in the article, MT was used as an experiment and proof of concept, and dedicated translation was done for the full release. Was that not the case?

Was the workflow MT -> human translation?

If so thats honestly such a lazy followthru given the technical hurdles overcome wrt the font tech

From the Github repo (https://github.com/ExxistanceDC/Segagaga-English-Translation), the translation went through a process called MTPE (Machine translation, post-editing). This works just like it sounds. The initial translation is done with machine translation, then human translators review and edit the resulting translation to try to correct any mistakes.

> What I call the “playtesting translation” — a base translation that allowed the artists and playtesters to get started early and understand what they were working on — was developed using a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5. That translation then went through a substantial, months-long human translator review. I don't think that the end product feels “machine-translated,” but that’s ultimately for you, the player, to judge.

> MTPE (Machine translation, post-editing). This works just like it sounds. The initial translation is done with machine translation, then human translators review and edit the resulting translation to try to correct any mistakes.

And the consensus among professional translators is that MTPE only saves time if you're willing to accept a half-assed result. For them to edit MT up to the standard of manual translation takes just as much expertise and effort as translating it manually in the first place.

> And the consensus among professional translators is that MTPE only saves time if you're willing to accept a half-assed result.

I have no particular interest in translation, but clearly when the person saying X is bad depends financially on you not buying X, you must take their word with a grain of salt.

It’s also used to shortchange professional translators by paying them a lower rate for MTPE jobs

> consensus among professional translators

[citation needed]

https://blog.gts-translation.com/2025/04/07/the-state-of-mac...

> 12.08% [of translators] say MTPE produces high-quality output.

> A significant portion (around 50%) of respondents do not offer discounts for MTPE work, arguing that post-editing can take as much time as traditional translation.

> Among those who do offer discounts, the most common range is between 10-30%.

the end product is incredibly stilted, missing in-jokes, has misnamed items and ruins like half the puns and wordplay in the game. it also switches past/present/future cases and is really inconsistent with indefinite articles.

And according to contributors like 645 it’s a bad machine translation.

Oh boo hoo.

Just boooooo.

Disappointed. Gif

As a side bar, I found it funny how in a Stanford lecture teaching various routes to training llms on the Machine Translation benchmark, the sample used was a French to English translation of 'the teddy bear is blue' or something similar.

After the lecture I reviewed the current production grade google translate...it butchered the translation

I wouldnt trust machine translation.

Is it possible for AIs in the future catch up those gags and meta humor in the language? Could the translation team have done a better job prompting the AI with the current technology?

Afaik japanese media (manga) abuse alot the use of puns on its language due to the amount of homonyms on it.

This stuff is really hard to translate. Imagine asking someone to translate 4chan into Japanese. This is ultra-S-tier hard translations. My goal in learning Japanese is the ability to read this kind of in-joke niche sub-culture slang. I'd love to read the original Densha Otoko posts from 2ch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Densha_Otoko

Avante-garde will always be lost on an inferential technology because to 'get it' it needs to be trained on sufficient volumes.

67 67 67 67 67 67 67 67 67 67

Edit: I may not exactly be spitting pearls, but passive downvoting for a genuine take on the matter based on professional experience in AI is a canary gasping for oxygen.

ai translations of japanese still miss the point and screw up / hallucinate articles and subjects between passages (switching genders, for instance, 3 times in one paragraph)

As someone who owned a dreamcast and stayed in line all night for a PS2, I can say that the DVD player functionality was HUGE. It was many, many people's first DVD player, and priced so that the game console was nearly 'free' on top of it.

The Dreamcast still got played post-PS2 purchase, but not much - fighting games, mostly. PS2's catalog was very, very strong and the combo just dominated.

> boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the translation work

Non-AI translators had literal decades to step up and do this and didn't so honestly who cares what they think about it.

The reason the PS2 was successful it was because it was very easy to unblock it and use pirated games.

The Dreamcast wasn't as easy as I can remember.

It was much easier to pirate games on the Dreamcast - the copy protection was broken to the degree that you could burn a game to a CD-R and have it Just Work without modifying the console in any way. It being both a total piracy free-for-all and also a catastrophic commercial failure doesn't seem to fit what you're saying.

Not to say that easy piracy is necessarily a death sentence for a console, the DS succeeded in spite of ubiquitous and cheap flashcarts, but the Dreamcast shows it's not necessarily a path to success either. There are just more pertinent reasons for a system to sink or swim.

I think that it was a game player and a DVD player had more to do with the success of the thing. Oh and it plays psx games too.

I owned both. The graphics/games were of similar quality. Having a larger game storage gave the ps2 a decent advantage. The dreamcast seemed more interesting. But the PS2 had a better customer feature set.

In models built prior October 2000 - it was very easy, just boot up Utopia loader and then you were able to run any game from CD.

Lol what? You got it the other way around. Also out of the dozen or so friends in my friend group who had a PS2, none of us had a modded PS2 or pirated games.

The PS2 was popular on its own and it wasn't related to piracy.

What are you talking about? The Dreamcast didn't even have adequate copy protection. I switched my entire collection to backups at some point to preserve the integrity of the original discs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com