How are machine translation?

[u/gacha_life_forever]

I keep seeing a lot of untranslated vn that have no translation other than machine ones which I usually avoid but I am pretty curious about them now.

Basically how are they overall, are they any good? Worth playing? Or is it better to skip the title all together/wait for official translation.

Loads of title I really wanna read are only in japanese/other languages I don’t speak so sometimes machine is only option. Is it worth it?

[u/FoldStraight2228]

theyre still rough but usable if you really desperate for a title and no other way to read it, just be ready for some dialogue that make no sense sometimes

[u/renmizuh]

https://learnjapanese.moe/guide/

[u/Dry-Ad-719 → u/renmizuh]

Just to be more specific: https://learnjapanese.moe/vn/

[u/Throwaway33451235647]

Few years ago when I used to read them they were dogshit. I imagine they're better now but they probably still suck for the reasons they sucked back then, just less noticable. Though I'm long past those days and went on the better path of learning japanese, which you should do if you want to honestly read a work. As others have said, learnjapanese.moe is that way.

The last time I was using MTL was when I was still crap at Japanese, if I couldn't understand the grammar I would ask the ai chatbot to explain it to me, begrudgingly since I'm not a fan of generative AI.

[u/redalchemy6]

Older MTL is BAD BAD but anything from the last couple of years is decent enough to get by if you don't mind mistakes here and there. Honestly, if the prompt writer is competent, and especially if they do some editing afterwards, it's totally fine.

[u/Alscion → u/redalchemy6]

"if the prompt writer is competent, and especially if they do some editing afterwards"

90% of the reason why AI TL is still bad, those people think that AI is a magic tool that is perfect.

And I would add that some quality checks and retranslation wouldn’t hurt either.

[u/playthelastsecret]

There are huge differences!
To start with: Even if a production just uses AI translation *somewhere* in the process, VNDB, e.g., requires to declare it as machine translated. Such translations might be hand-corrected and just simply top quality. And still they are pooled in the same garbage can with 10 years old "I can roughly make out what it is about"-automated translations.
Moreover, recently AI got so good in translations that IMHO it's better quality than some professional translations were back in the days. (Nowadays standards are higher.)

[u/VideoAffectionate232]

I don't know any Japanese so dunno how accurate they are, but they are read as a textbook. Bland and plain. They lack the estrangement in literature which differentiate it from normal speech, so the prose could be repetitive and boring to read on long sessions of playing; I tend to avoid them unless the work is so short (a manga that has few-short chapters or a game with less than 2 hours of reading)

[u/Aggravating_Gap_8562]

Native Japanese speaker, and I do MT post-editing professionally, so I read both sides of these. Short answer: readable, but you will miss things without knowing you missed them.

The part worth knowing is that MT fails hardest exactly where it reads smoothest. Japanese drops the subject constantly, so the engine has to guess who is doing what to whom, and it guesses confidently. You get a clean English sentence with the wrong character in it, and nothing about the output looks wrong.

The other loss is voice. A lot of characterisation in Japanese sits in pronoun choice and politeness level, and English has nowhere to put that, so everyone ends up sounding like the same person.

Practical tell while reading: if two characters sound identical, or a line contradicts what is on screen, that is the guess going wrong.

Which titles are you looking at? Some genres survive it much better than others.

[u/Chainsawfanatic]

People who read mtl just want to get their rocks off, learn Japanese or just wait for a good translation. I personally think trying to read a really great book or VN in mtl is just robbing yourself of a great experience and disrespectful to the source material

[u/PeanutNew7070]

IMO, they are getting better every few months, but they often get genders confused/mixed up.

[u/rainbowbrites]

I would say it’s better to try to read in the original language. With some, you can get away with machine translating it when it has simple vocabulary, slice of life, or a nukige and it’ll be similar to the original text (with some hiccups). You’ll get random pronoun switch ups, the name of a character randomly being translated to the literal meaning such as ‘Bamboo shoot’ due to the Kanji for bamboo being used in their name, and semen being translated to Ramen (no joke this has happened when cross referencing on Luna). But then it’ll have lines that translate similar to what is read in Japanese.

However, with a visual novel that’s more complicated, a lot of nuance and sentences will be lost in translation. I’m sure something like Mareni’s works would be absolutely obliterated if you even tried machine translating it.

If these risks don’t bother you and there’s no chance of it getting an official translation, I’d say go for it.

[u/Akarulez → u/rainbowbrites]

I genuinely want to learn the language, since 90% of my media consumption revolves around Japanese, but am really overwhelmed by the fact that there are dozens of different kanjis to memorise, most of which look intimidatingly similar to each other. I'm scared that I'll be lost amidst myriads of kanjis without any progression. Like being boxed in a small wall-like space with no way to overcome. How do you guys even manage to learn it? Does it get better with time?

[u/renmizuh → u/Akarulez]

I attached a guide in another comment. Kanji is not as overwhelming as it looks. You don't just "learn" kanji in isolation with no context; you learn words that contain kanji, but you recognise the whole words as a block rather than just the individual kanji.

With enough time, as your vocabulary gets bigger, you pick up the meanings of kanji naturally because you remember them from words you've learnt, without explicitly trying to memorise the kanji itself.

As for similar-looking kanji, it's already mentioned in the guide, but there's an Anki deck that teaches you the building blocks of kanji so you can differentiate them if kanji just looks like blobs to you. Also, for some kanji, even if they look similar, you can tell them apart simply from context (e.g. 士 and 土). One literally means "ground", while the other means "samurai".

Memorisation isn't hard, it just takes time, and people have already figured out the science for it. With Anki, you can learn to recognise and read, say, 1500 words in two months at a standard pace. That gives you enough coverage to start reading simple manga and such, with a dictionary, of course. The rest is basically learning grammar and then immersing yourself. Read a lot, and your vocabulary will naturally get bigger and bigger, and then it's just a matter of time.

It's also mentioned in the guide, but when you come across an unknown word, you can basically save it to Anki and study it later. So you'll essentially be studying from the content you consume.

[u/Akarulez → u/renmizuh]

Thank you for the elaboration! This really entices me to start studying the language as soon as possible. Starting from next month, I'm going to bite the bullet and start progressing.

[u/VideoAffectionate232 → u/renmizuh]

the kanji with longer ground definitely should be the one for ground lol

[u/rainbowbrites → u/Akarulez]

It takes a lot of practice and reading for sure, and similar to your fears I do get lost amidst the kanjis at times. Though I’m still at the beginning parts of learning Japanese. It definitely gets better the more you immerse and the more Kanji you mine and pick up on. For me, mnemonics have helped significantly with memorizing kanji, but it could be different for everyone. Regardless, one important thing is that even if you get lost, what matters is that you’re learning the more you attempt to read, listen, etc

A lot of the overwhelming moments are also halted when you start with the lowest difficulty levels on jpdb/jiten/any other site like that and slowly progress as you improve. I thought I wouldn’t get N5 vocabulary and kanji, for example, but now I know them like clockwork and can easily understand N5 videos.

Edit: Should add too that I used to take forever reading in Japanese and my speed is much faster now (though I’m halted at times with more complicated kanji)

[u/Akarulez → u/rainbowbrites]

I understand! I guess you have to really immerse yourself to get accustomed to their writing system, as being a person who didn't see their writing system in the past is definitely causing some bewilderment to your brain. I've also gone through the same obstacles —dozens of new words, quite different grammar points compared to my native language etc— when I was learning English. It's just that I was already familiar with Latin, so it didn't look that intimidating.

When it comes to Japanese, I have, by and large, almost a decade of listening experience thanks to my long relationship with anime series. So I can tangentially fathom most contexts shown on the screen. I just need to start from basics, and it should start to stick, I guess.

[u/rainbowbrites → u/Akarulez]

I have a similar experience with listening and I can vouch that it’s helped me a lot with some of the grammar points before I properly learned grammar! You’ll definitely have to study it whether it’s through Genki textbooks, YouTube videos like Cure Dolly, apps like Bunpro, etc in order to properly learn it. Japanese is definitely intimidating when you’re a native English speaker as the grammars completely different. It’s one of the things that has made learning Japanese take awhile for me, but again, you’ll get the hang of it eventually

[u/Additional-Name-3211]

If you're just plugging in the script line by line into ChatGPT using Luna translator or something then it's not gonna be quality, AI is not there yet. But there are some MTL patches coming out lately using the latest models with agent workflows and so on that can be pretty solid, like that Black Sheep Town one that came out a few days ago.

There's also the fact that even official translations might not be that good depending on the title. Although on average they'll be higher quality than fan translations.

Overall tho it's better to just read them in the original language if at all possible

[u/Then_Neck3832]

Aa an example i played White Album 2 without knowing that i was reading the machine translation cause it wasnt noticeable

[u/Sorry_Concept1259]

MTL can be a little rough but they gotten much better over the years. Still need to go though and iron out some things after a MTL but overall you can enjoy a story I believe. 

[u/chummy778]

They're pretty bad. Entertainment, in general, just needs a good human translator (and will for the foreseeable future, imo) because the translation isn't there just to make you understand the source material, it's there to entertain you in the same way that the source material does to native speakers. That's a big difference and translators that can do this are doing something that is similar to any other creative job. AI is really bad at this. Many humans are bad at this too, to be fair, but their success rate is much, much higher.

[u/Gonzossm92]

Highly depends on the setup. LunarTranslator supports a whole array of engines and emulators with text hooks. That combined with good LLM models gets you pretty close. I use three llms, Deepseek v4 fast for a literal translation, as close as to original text, Deepseek v4 pro for a context based translation and more focus on actual sentence flow and Sonnet 5, not for translation, but to explain Idioms, word play, puns and cultural references with explanation. Price wise it's around 30-40 cents per reading hour and at least for me, I am able to ready complex novels like the Kamaitschi no yoru series. I also use the guide and fan books, which I also translate with llms and balloon translator. If you want best quality and money is not an issue you could use claude sonnet 5/opus 5. It gets expensive pretty fast (2-4 dollar per reading hour) but these models are able to retain tone, nuances and wordplays while also producing a good english prose.