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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2516 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 10, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Obnoxious issues that arise when you read Chinese Cultivation Novels:

At some point, when the chapter count is well past 4 digits and/or when there's a hiatus, human translators (usually unpaid fans) can drop out, and you run into MTL (machine translation).

This might not sound like a problem today, after all, LLMs are pretty good at the job. To test that myself, I've converted chapters from (translated) English to Chinese and back, and find near perfect fidelity.

No, dear reader, the issue is that the MTL can be old. And it's non-trivial to find the original Chinese sources.*

Cue me weeping in agony as the best translation of a favorite novel changes character gender and names every few paragraphs, and translates what was previously "Land of Sin" as "Naughty Land".

Some frankly insane bastards persevere nonetheless, becoming one with the Dao of MTL, and self-reportedly no longer see the broken Mandarin Matrix but grokk the underlying intent. Unfortunately, often at the cost of being unable to process normal English.

Fuck it, I'm going to do dig down the Chinese version and throw it into Google Gemini, a million token-wide context window can't hurt.

*Most places where you can read Xianxia in English use unauthorized or outright pirated translations. And these sites all steal from one another, so if a bad translation becomes the default, good luck finding a better one.

Some frankly insane bastards persevere nonetheless, becoming one with the Dao of MTL, and self-reportedly no longer see the broken Mandarin Matrix but grokk the underlying intent. Unfortunately, often at the cost of being unable to process normal English.

That's why I stopped reading Chinese novels. When I read them, even though I read "translated" novels(I started around 2017, and back then shitty translations were much worse than MTL/LLMs are now) my ability to read anything else became much worse. I speed-read them, because the faster I go through a story, the pacing and other things make up for the lacking in coherence. In the end I got to a point where I could almost skim past sentences if I didn't find them interesting.

Although I also just ran out of stuff to read. I drop things very quickly if I don't like them, and I dropped almost everything I tried, so I read novels on Royalroad and English web novels like Worm instead.

I wasn't sure how seriously to take the people claiming that reading MTL actually damaged their reading comprehension (the subreddit has a lot of LARPing and shitposting), but after hearing your account I'm glad I didn't give in to the temptation!

Finding good Xianxia can be a slog. I've read maybe 4 novels, and 3 of them were highly recommended by word of mouth. Not that it's much easier to find good stuff on RR either, but at least you can expect legible grammar most of the time.

Some frankly insane bastards persevere nonetheless, becoming one with the Dao of MTL, and self-reportedly no longer see the broken Mandarin Matrix but grokk the underlying intent. Unfortunately, often at the cost of being unable to process normal English.

Betcha Claude can grok the underlying intent and create a less-borked translation too, and any damage to its sanity would be isolated to only that chat. Care to provide a sample?

I've actually spent about 4 hours yesterday using Gemini 1206 to translate as I go, the 2 million token CW meant I can throw in dozens of chapters and have it produce perfectly pleasant text. There are a few stylistic quirks, or perhaps they were the original translator's quirks that aren't present anymore. It certainly doesn't garble gender and do anything too funky.

I'm sure Claude would be great at the task, but even the original GPT-4 would consider it trivial.

Here's the site I've been grabbing the raw text from if you want to take a look: https://www.piaotia.com/html/7/7095/6107291.html

The horrid "official" translation can be found on:

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2771.html

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2771.html

Can you give us a small sample of the better translation for comparison?

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2770-splitting-the-road-with-one-slash.html

That's the bad translation.

Here's a better one on pastebin:

https://pastebin.com/b4R2hWF7

The most obvious changes are that it very sensibly decides that "Land of Sin" is a better translation than "Naughty Land". A character doesn't mysteriously turn male partway through.

"Manjusaka", a type of plant with connections to the underworld, is a far more contextually and culturally appropriate translation for a location as opposed to "Red Spider Lily".

While a matter of taste, "Covenant Alliance" seems more elegant than "Sanctuary Alliance", and is what human translators initially opted for.

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2771.html

Wow you weren't kidding about that translation quality. And yeah probably any recent LLM can do it, but that 2M context limit is pretty sweet when you need it.

Lo and behold, after figuring out a way to find OG Chinese pirate sites, and then finding one that doesn't use JS nonsense to prevent copy and pasting, I can read the rest of the novel in peace. A tad-bit awkward, but absolutely better than what was the state of the art in 2017, with seemingly no attention from a human editor.

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