Japanese publishers, including Shueisha and Shogakukan, have invested $4.9 million in Mantra, a startup leveraging AI to accelerate manga translation.
I don’t read many mangas, so I don’t know how good or bad the translations are, but I thought the news was interesting at least.
The last MTL i read was fine but not great, but that already describes many official localizations out there. Even if the mtl is bad it’ll probably get rid of the cheap, low quality localization teams and leave it in the hands of actual talent or passionate fans. Either way i don’t see this a being a bad thing.
On the other hand, the biggest localization scandal (for lack of a better word) didn’t happen at the translation, it happened when failed YA authors were allowed to rewrite the work, which will still probably be a problem. So it might not do very much good either.
I think this is an important point. If this can take the translator’s ego out of the equation it would be a clear win. But then, they would probably insert it back again in the revision stage. My best case scenario would be that with the AI doing the heavy lifting there is enough human workforce going around so that those type of translators who rewrite the story find themself jobless.