I have a problem, or rather I had a problem,
and my solution to said problem, wasn't the best.
My problem was that I had at one point finished watching an anime
and I loved it so much that I decided to dig into the anime source material
only to find that said source material had not been 100% fully translated.
And the roadblock caused by
a lack of content would not be resolved for me immediately.
I would have to wait for translations.
But even if the light novel from which the anime was based
was not available freely.
It just so happened that the series started as a web novel,
and that is freely and publicly available.
If only I could read Japanese.
I wanted to talk about this mostly because I believe in the high likelihood
of someone being in a similar situation.
We talk a lot on this channel about the increasing number of anime
over the last several years, but also there is a massive amount of web
novels, light novels and manga that exist and I honestly do not believe
for one second that we English speakers will ever have access
to everything that seems impossible at this juncture.
Official translations are great, but they are a gradual process
and are usually prompted by popularity, among other things.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Japanese stories freely available
for the Japanese public that might never get translated for us here in the West.
And the story that I want to tell today is not from all that long ago
after I decided to be fully caught up with the light novel translations,
I found myself in a situation of just having read a cliffhanger
and succumbed to the question of how I could possibly quench my thirst
for more of the story and not, you know, wait the currently
estimated year for it all to come out.
Today, I want to tell that story to explain my thought process
and my experience going from an anime watcher to a light novel reader
to a web novel translator so that you may decide for yourself
if it is something that you want to experience.
But first Glass Reflection would like to thank the sponsor for the video today.
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Now, that story that anime that I was watching was acendance of a bookworm.
It's a series that I first heard about when its anime began airing in late 2019.
It's ostensibly an isekai about a Japanese woman getting reborn
as a five year old commoner in a fantasy medieval society and follows
her story that begins with her attempting to make books
out of the very little materials that are available to her.
Since, you know she is a commoner now, she is poor,
and the literacy rate of those around her is basically zero.
Bookworms anime had three seasonal cours totaling 36 episodes with two OVA
episodes, which in all honesty is extremely respectable.
But considering the amount of shows
that only get like 12 or 13 episodes nowadays, yeah, that's pretty good.
But at the end of those 36 episodes I found myself wanting more.
The story was evolving beyond our main character, just wanting to make books.
She had relationships with interesting characters.
She got embroiled in local politics at the religious temple
and even got thrown
through a kidnaping plot because of her knowledge and mana capacity.
But I asked the question, Well,
how much more could there possibly be?
A lot.
As I found out, the anime for Bookworm again took 36 episodes and those episodes
covered the content provided from seven light novels not even extremely well.
In fact, as I found out later, that around
four of those seven were just kind of glossed over.
But still a lot of content for the anime to cover until you realize
that the Light novel only just recently released Volume 32.
Yeah, so the anime barely covers
what, 20% of this story right now.
So what was I to do?
Well, since Bookworm is a series about a character who wants to read books,
I proceeded to do the only logical thing that I could.
I read the books, but now all the books are translated.
Yeah.
And you know, I am slowly becoming obsessed.
I tear through these books, spending several
weeks of my free time reading and sometimes rereading a bunch of them.
Such is the nature of Kazuki Sensei's excellent foreshadowing and worldbuilding
as even a reread is heavily enjoyable because you get to see how something
was alluded to sometimes volumes in advance.
And eventually I made it to volume 24, or more specifically Part five,
Volume three as the light novel was split into parts based on their arcs.
That's where I was now.
The Light novel is being translated in English over on J Novel Club,
and to the best of my knowledge, Bookworm actually seems to be getting
a kind of special treatment over there.
Most releases that I've seen JNovel Handle are not always constant
per series, like some volumes have weeks or even longer between releases.
But as of late, Bookworm has been extremely consistent
in releasing approximately two newly translated
chapters every week, and it is very consistent with that.
I can only thank the translator for their absolutely superb service.
I am 200% looking forward to reading more every single week for the next year.
So shout out to the translator.
But not too long ago, while I was finding myself surprisingly
content with the weekly schedule, one particular chapter
left me on a cliffhanger, one that was the kind that had me
lying awake at night thinking about it and I could not stand it.
And I wanted to know what was going to happen next.
But how could I possibly do that?
And now it is.
At this point we come to Machine Translation or MTL.
Now, this has been quite the contentious topic,
especially as of late with the rise of ChatGPT and the like.
I struggle to use the term AI in this context
because I honestly and personally feel that these machine learning
algorithms are not AI in the traditional sense.
Heck, I even heavily debated putting AI in the title of this video,
but the YouTube algorithm would probably love it if I do so if it's there.
Now you know why.
Even if I disagree with that description on what these things are.
Now that said, using computers at home to do your translating for
you is not really anything new.
I have both seen and used Google Translate in order to translate words and phrases
for over a decade now, But that has always been the thing,
the main limitation there.
Words and phrases.
The more you give Google translate, the less accurate it gets, especially
if it doesn't understand like the sentence structure of the language involved.
And that's to say nothing about proper context interpretation.
So for my purposes of wanting to take a publicly available web novel
and translated into English, Google Translate is terrible.
I don't recommend it. Okay, then.
So what's next?
Well, deep l is a language learning model touted as the world's most
accurate translator, which is a bold claim if I've ever heard one.
But it has its limitations.
Unless you want to pay for it, it's free.
Translation covers only 5000 words, and looking into
how many chapters of the web novel that I wanted to translate
and knowing that that was in the range of like several
hundred thousand words, that would not work for my purposes.
Now, I could have, of course, paid for it, but I was in the experimental
phase of my research and was not really keen on paying
for a translation service, only to later find out that it didn't do what I wanted
and I was left with no story and even less money than I was before.
To be clear, I am not averse to using money to get what I want here.
I am already paying for Jnovel’s
subscription service because I know that it is worth it.
I know what I am getting and I am fully willing to pay that price.
But if what I am getting becomes a big old question mark,
well then I would rather continue my research and find another option.
So that is what I did.
The next logical option, of course, would be ChatGPT.
It has limitations in how much you can send at a time.
So every chapter would have to be, you know,
copy and paste it over in chunks, which causes
interesting issues, but they can be mitigated to a point
and after all, I know many people look at ChatGPT as some kind of magic.
So I'm sure I could make it work.
Here's how it went.
If you paste the text in directly and just say, Translate this, well,
it sort of works.
And it is honestly, leagues
better than the other free alternatives like, say, Google.
In fact, it was readable
and in most cases even understandable.
But sometimes I found that ChatGPT had a very hard time determining
who was speaking and using proper pronouns accordingly.
Not only that, but the more unique words like character names, places and fantasy
objects that have no real world equivalent were largely hit or miss.
I did attempt to fix some of that specifically by giving ChatGPT a prompt
to to tell it, to keep tenses in mind to stick to a first person perspective.
And I even gave it a list of proper translations of a number of unique words
which it promptly ignored when inconvenient.
No, seriously, I gave it a list.
I said This word in Japanese is a name.
Here's how you translate it.
And it ignored me.
Not only that, but as I had to punch things
in a little bit at a time, it would occasionally forget that
I was asking it to translate things at all and would just spit Japanese back at me.
Needless to say, for that part at least I was not impressed.
But at the end of the day, it was free, it was legible, and I got what I paid for.
Do I regret translating and reading the rest of ascendance of a bookworm this way?
Not at all.
There are plenty of flaws in the translation that I read
and honestly comparing it to the official translation.
Well, there is no comparison there.
The official is just that much better. There are things.
There are things that I love with how the story was
translated in the official books and how it is presented.
And I can't get a lot of that from the Web novels MTL.
There are many times like the protagonist of the story, Myne,
she talks to herself about events that occur
and while those inner thoughts do exist within the MTL.
Her voice is just so different from the official version.
She doesn't speak the same way because that is also part of the translation
and the MTL just can't gather that uniqueness from the original text.
It cannot sub in slang or informal speech that does not directly come
from the original, it just can't interpret it that way.
So when reading it feels like a bunch of like the narrative soul is missing. Yes.
Now I know how the story ends.
I know what happens to a bunch of the characters, at least most of them.
Others are trapped in spin off land
and will apparently stay there until the late novel is completed.
But with all of that, at the end of the day, I cannot say that
I did not enjoy my experience, which made it all the more frustrating
during nail biting moments of the story when ChatGPT just forgot what we were doing.
Multiple times a character may be dying
and ChatGPT may be like, Oh, I'm sorry, you wanted that in English?
I thought you wanted me to rephrase everything in kanji
while also ignoring the examples that you gave me, because of course,
that's what I wanted it to do at this exact moment.
As I sit here, I do not believe with the tech
as it is that official translators will be or should be replaced.
And honestly, having read through a bunch
of other MTL’s at this point, there is just something about them
that lacks the soul compared to human translations.
They are still readable and they can be enjoyable.
But if I had to choose between them, I would still take a human translator
in a heartbeat.
Shout out once again to the translator for Bookworm.
So if you are watching an anime or reading a light novel
and get blue balled by a cliffhanger in content and decide to take a gander
at translating a publicly available web novel,
I mean, it is functional and it can work for you,
but you have to know what you are getting yourself into and what you will miss.
Do I recommend it for most people?
Nah, not really, but for some
it only needs to be for
a series that you were just so desperately infatuated with
that you are able to overlook
so many of the flaws that you are going to inevitably experience.
If you can do that, then this option is certainly available to you
and I wish you well.
I'm sure someone in the comments will lambast me and say that of course
eventually a new model will become available
and it will translate things better and faster.
And that may be true, but I feel like there is still one advantage
in the case of like bookworm, for example, that the MTL will never have.
The MTL will never be able to talk to the author
and clarify things, which means that it will always get something wrong.
But then again, I mean,
like Crunchyroll went ahead and subtitled the The Bookworms main character
as Main in the anime when the light novel calls her Myne with a Y.
So it's not like human translators are perfect all the time anyway.
Or maybe that's just Crunchyroll.
And with that, we have reached
the end of the video.
I did want to give quick
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the less sponsorships that Glass Reflection will need at any given time.
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