With the recent discussion around AI translation of anime (relevant post), it reminded me of this article/interview I read a little while back in which the topic was brought up with actual, professional translators.
If the topic interests you, check out the full article; it’s great. It has lots more info and analysis that what I have put below. I simply picked out a quote from each of the professional translators they spoke to. The full article has much more and great analysis by the author as well.
Zack Davisson (professional translator):
I would say that, like it or not, AI is coming. That genie is not going back in the bottle. And it is improving. The days of Google Translate being a joke are gone. Who knows what AI translation will be like ten years from now? Twenty? Something people need to think about. Hating it is not going to make it go away.
Matthias Hirsh (professional translator):
Machine translations (MT) nearly always need to be proofread or edited by a human, so in many cases, you might as well have hired a human translator. Additionally, having to compete with AI and MT devalues our work. Rates are stagnant among translation agencies as it is. More importantly, however, MT is cutting corners and ultimately leaves the end user with a worse outcome than they would have with a qualified human translator.
Kim Morrissy (professional translator):
Corporations should definitely be more aware of the current limitations of MTL/AI and not see them as a shortcut to reducing labour costs. It’s not just purely a matter of ethics but making people aware that current applications will either see a big drop in quality or require more human labour than they were led to believe. As for the consumers, I don’t necessarily think they should be expected to vote with their wallets purely over this issue, and it would be naive to expect them to do so, honestly. In the future, as AI improves, we may see the debate take on new forms. Personally, I like being optimistic about technological progress. I welcome the tech, just not the way business culture works around it. People have to argue for their rights as workers, otherwise those rights will get eroded over time. That’s just unfortunately how the world works.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen it happen at all with a professional translation, and only very rarely with amateur ones. I’ve seen pro translators screw up, self-censor, or get censored by management that are fearful of lawsuits, but none of those represent an agenda beyond making money. Messing up the translation deliberately is a good way for the translator to not get paid and/or not get more gigs. I won’t say that it never happens, but I doubt it’s more than once in ten years.
Some fans are too sensitive to perceived “agendas” and too quick to allocate blame, methinks.
(As for MTL, it isn’t there yet. Maybe in another decade or two. And as you say, the management layer that’s terrified of lawsuits isn’t going anywhere.)
I mostly agree. I have seen it happen once or twice, but that’s it. It’s not good obviously, but it’s not as if the industry is overrun by it. Not even close.
So far it reportedly at least happened in
Probably many more, those were just the ones I could find articles about
Let’s see here:
Only information I can find is that an anonymous message board poster claimed that the translator posted on Twitter that she was mistranslating on purpose. No link, no indication that the Twitter account (if it exists) actually belongs to that translator, no nothing. In the absence of other evidence, this looks more like a baseless rumour or defamation against the translator.
One article, basing its claims of mistranslation on a mangaka interview the official translator may very easily not have known about—the company will not have rounded up peripheral informaiton for the translator the way fans do. Translator error yes, translator agenda no.
Found some complaints about an eccentric choice for translation of a form of address with no direct equivalent in English. Arguably an error, definitely not an agenda.
One mention of a dub alteration that is almost certainly not the translator’s fault and again doesn’t seem to involve an agenda, just overlocalization. (Complaints about the manga don’t count.)
I’m not going to bother checking on the rest, because I expect I’ll find more of the same. Unless the translator is mistranslating on purpose in order to further some cause or other, the word “agenda” does not apply. There might have been an agenda in the first case if it’s more than baseless rumour (which I doubt).