New posts

Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="Gorse, post: 6888, member: 73"] Strategist, bless you for engaging me in good faith, because I don't think either of us is going to change each other's minds. That being said... OK, I've noticed that this is a very recent thing to say amongst the pro-censorship crowd as of late, and as someone who's been following this stuff since the mid-2010s, it seems like an obvious deflection now that alterations to Japanese games have become a widely-publicized to (and widely-despised by) general audiences. Unfortunately, I see it as exactly that – a deflection tactic – because it's easily disproven in both many of the examples I've already posted and the tweets of countless localizers, like [URL='https://external-preview.redd.it/k9iEYjMAclAWpd2NHCnIv9rsZD5FdCVz9zFlt2VcqI4.jpg?auto=webp&s=2d22089f985498ac10cd397a1fab5b9622973dc2']this famous one[/URL] (forgive that stuff at the bottom, I just got it from an image search) or [URL='https://boundingintocomics.com/manga/western-localizers-attack-fans-looking-to-ai-for-more-accurate-handling-of-japanese-media-you-clearly-cant-appreciate-the-work-of-humans/']this recent controversy[/URL], to the contrary. Seriously, I'd like to know – where did you hear that "it's the corporations" line from? Is there an e-celeb or someone who started this? I'm really, genuinely curious. It's only popped up in the past year or so, and I think it's utterly disingenuous. Of course, if it really [I]was [/I]the corporations telling them to do this, we'd have firm confirmation by people who don't have an incentive to lie to protect their reputations (with, of course, different individual confirmations for each company this has applied to), but... uh... we don't. Also, speaking as someone with an MBA: Companies don't care about sociological issues, because their only goal is to generate revenue. (I could give you some recent examples, but this forum has rules against political conversation, SO...) The thought of a company changing a video game girl outfit in a video game is simply ridiculous to anyone who doesn't have something to gain by believing it. Because of their ideology, as shown in the tweets above. If you're localizing a Japanese game that, say, has a line (or, god forbid, a whole game mechanic like in Fire Emblem Fates) that could potentially go against your sociological beliefs, you could change it, so that... well, so that you feel a bit better, I guess, because it certainly doesn't actually do anything in the real world beyond annoying your customer base. Because AI won't change anything based on a certain ideology. If a company uses AI to alter content in a game's localization, that will also be an issue – but, of course, when people say AI translations will be better than official ones, they're referring to [I]locally-hosted, individually-run [/I]AI translations applied to the base Japanese game. The great thing about AI is that you don't even need the company to provide you with it – you just run your own model atop a copy of the game, and you're good to go! That alone makes it a hugely-appealing proposition to me. They're the [I]most [/I]qualified to do so, because they're consumers unhappy with a product they've been sold. It really doesn't matter what people with a graduate degree in Japanese say – the customer demands accuracy, and these are electronics goods being sold to that customer. That's capitalism, baby! ?????????? And I've seen several pro-localization Twitter ranters get debunked even harder. I wonder who the customer base agrees with more? Yeah, and that was [I]a very bad thing[/I]. It was considered a [I]detriment to those games, and people didn't like it[/I]. Nintendo only did it at the time because they didn't know better – once they did, they stopped. (This is part of the reason why Japanese media translations in the 2000s, after all the initial kerfuffle, were so heavily acclaimed.) The problem only started up again when ideologically-driven translators started cropping up in the early-to-mid-2010s (usually in response to some other koo-koo cultural issues perpetuated on Twitter, but again, don't want to break the no politics rule.) AI – a magical computer program that creates translations better than real people can, in seconds, for free – is not what I would call a "lousy solution". Dude, how many examples do you want? I gave you six in that other post, and two more here – shall I go up to ten? Twenty? You say "when", and I'll stop. In any other line of work, if you do your job poorly, you get fired. These localizers have done their jobs poorly, a solution has come along, so... Poof! ? You know as well as I do – if you're being honest with me, which I hope you are – that companies aren't the ones dictating that anime girls should wear more clothing, or that face-rubbing minigames should be removed, or that any other number of translation issues that [I]just so happen to line up perfectly[/I] with localizers' ideological values be implemented. It's the localizers. It's been them for well over a decade at this point. [B]The audience now knows that they've been given an inferior product, and that AI will solve the issue. [/B]Fight it if you must, but the thing about superior robot lifeforms is that they're, by definition, superior. Here's what it comes down to, for me, at least: I wouldn't be so pleased about AI translation if real translators were better than them, but they aren't. From what I've seen of Japanese-to-English translators on the Internet – which is quite a lot, I'd say! – they're [I]all [/I]insufferable, smug, smarmy, politically-motivated ideologues who care more about stroking their own egos than they do about providing a good, entertaining experience. (I have a few pet theories as to why, but that’s neither here nor there.) I'm sure – I [I]hope[/I] – that some translators genuinely are good, professional people [B]who would translate something accurately even if they disagreed with it[/B], but I've never seen one do so. AI will [I]always [/I]translate something accurately, so it's empirically better for what I want. Developers, like those mentioned in this thread's OP, are starting to agree. [/QUOTE]

Verification

Online statistics

Members online: 135

Guests online: 229

Total visitors: 364

Totals may include hidden visitors.

Forum statistics

Threads: 12,348

Messages: 301,636

Members: 863,886

Latest member: Lover_girlxoxo

Reply to thread

Online statistics

Forum statistics

Advertisers