this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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Weird, I was thinking this morning about Machine Translation of books and anime and stuff and realized it was (poorly) making all languages the same and in effect was a tower of babel.
Translators have been using machine translation way before AI. The usual workflow is: you feed the original to the translation engine, that goes into a translation management program, where you usually have two or three panes; original, machine, human final draft.
The tools include dictionaries, thesaurus, y your own custom dictionary, and other tools.
The problem is that now, people, and businesses, are treating AI's output as correct, essentially skipping the human part, which is the context aware step. An org I work with just translated an entire book, with no human proofing. After members complained, they asked me to proof it. I essentially did the same process. It was a bitch getting paid, because "AI did it"
I doubt machine translation will reach professional translators. Some things are hard to translate. Sometimes you should explain cultural differences. Sometimes you have to replace a concept/thing with a completely different one, but consistently.
It’s a lot easier for manuals etc
AI will replace professional translators not because it's better but because it's cheaper
It's already happening. I know someone who is a translator of legal documents and international contracts, and almost all the jobs are gone and replaced with AI already.
It's only cheaper if the mistakes it makes cost less to fix than paying a human to do it in the first place. That said, shifting operating costs to operating risk usually looks good on paper because the risks don't get quantified properly or at all.
You're not wrong!
I can't even imagine what it costs for a big, international company to handle the fallout from a system that's implemented wrong due to errors in the translation of the contract.
We don’t always get the cheapest stuff. Poorly made CGI animes still get avoided afaik
Machine translators seem to do an especially poor job with Japanese, very often using the wrong pronoun.
Japanese to English is pretty tricky, in part because it's more standard in Japanese to fully omit words instead of using a pronoun when something is known from context. A response to "What are you doing with that book?" in English might be "I'm going to return it," but in Japanese you'd just say "Return" (返す。). So a machine translator would probably have to be very good at context to guess right a lot of the time.
It's the same in German.
Also, remember the meme "Poland cannot into space"? Syntax-wise, that's a completely valid sentence in German because at times, you don't need a main verb and the auxiliary one will do.
I have never heard of this meme before.
That’s interesting to learn, thanks for teaching me! I would like to add my observation that informal English works pretty similarly. The example conversation turning into:
“Whatcha gonna do with that book?”
“Return it.”
seems normal to my ears. I guess the difference is that the object “it” is still mandatory which is pretty helpful context for a translation machine.
This is an issue in professional translations of animes and third person pronouns. Time restraints probably also play a role. Some issues could be solved by asking the author or reading manga translations, which also could’ve gotten it wrong.
I don’t speak Japanese, but it seems to use gender in different places and uses pronouns less frequently.
For this Japanese to German is even harder than Japanese to English because even words like "translator" are gendered.
In Tensura's English dub they addressed Beretta with "she/her".
https://antifandom.com/tensura/wiki/Beretta#Trivia
Even German to English and the other way around can be tricky if you don’t have enough context.
For "I’m the translator" German has to gender translator: "Ich bin der Übersetzer"/"Ich bin die Übersetzerin"
English can struggle with sentences, where it has to use madam or sir with second person, since German has a polite second person that is neutral. "Ich danke Ihnen" to "Thank you, sir"/"Thank you, madam"
Sometimes you understand people even less if you think you speak the same language but don't