Localisation A.I. translation company Mantra to allegedly partner with major Japanese manga publishers
- Thread starter Ebicentre
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I wish I had this video on hand, but I remember seeing a Japanese start-up that does A.I. translations (it might've been Mantra), and everyone in that room was Japanese. They showed off what their human editing process looked like, where basically the text was translated and they only corrected it when it didn't match the context (e.g. the subject of the sentence).
I totally understand the concern around human editors, especially if they come from the same clique that have been ruining a bunch of Japanese media for us. But at the same time, no matter how good they become, A.I. translation models still need at least some human supervision to check for accuracy. The best we can ask is for Japanese companies to be extremely picky with who supervises the translations.
It's not the accuracy that concerns me, it's the fear that it's an attack vector for foreign activists to continue to influence Japanese games directly.
I wouldn't even care if localizations were terrible if localizers could just stay in their lane and leave the original version of the game alone, but now I know they can't be trusted with even the slightest bit of influence so I'm in favor of 100% AI translation with no human factor.
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Would you be okay with a human editor if s/he's properly ethnic Japanese with English fluency?
Depends if he shares the same ideas as localizers, knowing English makes them more likely to be corrupted by western activists. Japanese people aren't immune to this either, just look at how Kotaro Uchikoshi started putting gay shit into his games after interacting with the western fanbase regularly.
So is Square Enix's output going to stop being woke in 6 or so years, and the localizations are going to be faithful to the source material? I read that it will take around the time of a full development cycle before we actually start seeing positive change from game companies that decide to stop being woke.
I sure hope so!
Great news. I hope someone buys a few books and we can look at Mantra's quality, I would like to believe it's a thousand times better than a localizer.
from what I have heard AI Translations can basically do 5-10 hour games worth of text, but a JRPG might be much longer. But with how fast Hardware, AI Models, and even Deepl(which has it's own AI Translation API) is evolving, I would like to think 2028 and 2030 is definitely going to be the years we will see it happen throughout. My hope is 2028 for Manga, Anime, LN. 2030 for Video Games.
What I'm really waiting for is AI voice acting.
I know some of you may disagree and you may prefer live-voiced lines because they are (sometimes) higher quality. But the way AAA studios schedule work and the order of operations in which they record voice lines, they're all wrong. Studios are bringing in big-budget names for voice acting like Samuel L Jackson and Jennifer Hale, and these people have very limited schedule availability and their time is extremely expensive.
If part of a game were to be reworked, that part would necessarily need new voice lines. So all the best development that we used to see in unvoiced games with ending variability and crazy plot twists just can never happen. They'd be too expensive or impossible to implement due to voiceover work.
If the voices are performed by AI we go right back to the old paradigm where the core gameplay developers are free to define the scope of the project and wrestle creative control back from the managerial class. And, for all the bitching about troons and subversive kikes, we all really know that the real people at fault are the mindless midwits in middle management and the C-suite who make brainless retard decisions and let the troons and kikes run wild.
A game like Xenogears or Star Ocean 2 or Daggerfall just can't be made from scratch with professionally-voiced lines. It's too expensive and it's too difficult. The only solution is to either go back to amateur-voiced lines like the developers themselves doing the voicework or switch to AI.
I know some of you may disagree and you may prefer live-voiced lines because they are (sometimes) higher quality. But the way AAA studios schedule work and the order of operations in which they record voice lines, they're all wrong. Studios are bringing in big-budget names for voice acting like Samuel L Jackson and Jennifer Hale, and these people have very limited schedule availability and their time is extremely expensive.
If part of a game were to be reworked, that part would necessarily need new voice lines. So all the best development that we used to see in unvoiced games with ending variability and crazy plot twists just can never happen. They'd be too expensive or impossible to implement due to voiceover work.
If the voices are performed by AI we go right back to the old paradigm where the core gameplay developers are free to define the scope of the project and wrestle creative control back from the managerial class. And, for all the bitching about troons and subversive kikes, we all really know that the real people at fault are the mindless midwits in middle management and the C-suite who make brainless retard decisions and let the troons and kikes run wild.
A game like Xenogears or Star Ocean 2 or Daggerfall just can't be made from scratch with professionally-voiced lines. It's too expensive and it's too difficult. The only solution is to either go back to amateur-voiced lines like the developers themselves doing the voicework or switch to AI.
That is actually a very thoughtful perspective to AI voice acting as a whole and your right about how unfeasible it is to have consistently high quality voice acting performance for video games, without having to sacrifice the scope of the game itself. Now, I would always prefer live acting, but for the sake of affordability and preserving the quality and scope of a video game, I am more than willing to accept AI voice acting after reading your analysis. It does make me wonder why Visual Novels with their branching paths and different endings are able to afford quality voice acting performance to record hundred of hours of different dialogue, but we can see that in some of the standard mainstream game.
Oh. I would like it if someone used AI to re-translate the Dragon Quest games released on the Nintendo DS. The official localizations are horrible, especially Dragon Quest 4's.