Re:Show HN: Unlimited machine translation API for $200 / Month
by lifthrasiir on Wednesday June 01, 2022 @01:13PM
(#31584966)
For the context, this paragraph is the beginning of Mushoku Tensei [1], a popular light novel series. (That's why there are human translators for this otherwise obscure bit of text!) I haven't exactly read it, but the subsequent text [2] suggests that the protagonist got expelled from his family and indeed became homeless. The machine translator might lack this exact context but ideally could still recognize that just having no fixed address here wouldn't fit the mood.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushoku_Tensei
[2] https://ncode.syosetu.com/n9669bk/1/ (it's a norm for recent light novel series to be serialized in free web sites and then get published)
Of course, I could be totally wrong. But I couldn't know. I'm a big consumer of machine translated text (with the purpose of understanding the information contained) and I do feel like it's game over for casual human translations. Usually, with a tiny bit of effort (some googling) you can figure out the ambiguous parts. If I need help I'd rather just ask about a specific word, phrase or ask a general question about the text. Human translators veer too far off the original trying to produce "proper" text in the target language, which usually destroys information. Machine translations fail in a more obvious way.