Comic Strips

The problem is that the AI doesn't understand cultural context. I dunno where you're from so pardon me for assuming you're likely an English speaker.

A good translation isn't just to translate what the text says but to communicate the same idea to the reader or viewer within their cultural context. A good example is Disney's Aladdin where Robin Williams improvised A LOT during the recording sessions and most of his jokes are full of contemporary American cultural context. I'm Danish and most Danish kids didn't understand these American jokes so our translators decided to switch out some jokes with other jokes that conveyed similar points but within a Danish cultural context.

An AI cannot do that. It will translate what is written and it will be fucking nonsense to the receiver because they don't understand the context or the references.

AI is only good at translating as long as what is written can be translated 1:1. And even then I sometimes wonder. Because as a Dane I have noticed how terrible Word is at Danish when it comes to corrections. It follows English language context and will underline correct words in red and suggest alternative that aren't real Danish. For example, Danish words are slammed together while in English they are separated = skolelærer - school teacher. Word could very well decide to red line skolelærer and suggest to you that you should separate the word and make it two = skole lærer. But in Danish that would nullify the meaning. Now it is no longer a school teacher but a school and a teacher.

And I have seen on streaming services like Netflix and on steam how they lazily threw descriptions into a translator and it is just the most broken Danish I have ever read. It is so fucked because the newer generations of Danes who use these services are being influenced by them to learn incorrect Danish.

I have very limited trust in AI to do a better job at it since it isn't Danish people that have trained it and it doesn't understand our culture, our history nor how we communicate with one another. Everything that comes out of digital text based platforms from the US is our language filtered and massacred through US context. It is very very bad in my opinion and incredibly lifeless and soulless.

It would be the same the other way around btw. Me writing a piece of text with significant Danish cultural context and humor, slang and references would be translated into total nonsense for an English speaker, I'm sure.

You think it's OK because it spits out grammatically correct language on your end, but if you spoke both languages you'd get how it fails. Look at translations of Korean comics if you'd like to see how badly mechanical translation is when it's a connected story across multiple chapters, I was reading a comic where a character said he liked the elegant and sophisticated sound of calling a lightning strike skill ''bolt'' instead of whatever he was calling it ''lighting strike'' I think. It took me a while to realize what or whoever translated it didn't know how to look at the context of the translation and find a English word that English speakers would find at least old fashioned if not archaic and of course longer or more poetic sounding. It's like the whole thing when JRPGs can't figure out if they should localize names by just spelling out the phonetic sounds in Roman letters or actually translating the meaning of the name, or a thing no one's ever done and find a name in a European language family that has the same meaning.

Just like the AI art, it's not replacing good translation, it's replacing hack job translations, it's replacing mediocre and predictable art. I really don't care if someone uses AI in the pre-production or some post production functions, just not the part you need a human for, the actual creativity, there's an adage in 3D animation ''it you let the computer do it, it's gonna suck.'' You can let the computer do inbetweens, but you better be giving it nothing near a key frame. It has to really be the very least important frames.

AI currently completely does not understand the context of translation when it comes to visual media. Whereas a human translator can use that for additional interpretation

It's still doing a consistently poorer job than a skilled translator, because it has no concept of nuance or tone. I encounter people getting themselves worked up over information in AI-translated news articles, so I go back to the source material and discover it's mistranslated, under-translated, or just completely omitted parts of sentences. It's very Purple Monkey Dishwasher.

The quality is better than it was a decade ago, sure, but that's a pretty low bar. Back then it was gibberish, nowadays it's natural-sounding phrases with incorrect translations.

Star Trek or Stargate?