Segagaga has a ton of obscure, referential, meta humor that isn't easily translated to English. The "cleaned up machine translation" approach means that a lot of this is lost. Looking at some screenshots of the game, the script seems stiff and overly formal, much like how direct machine translation of Japanese text reads. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2jjromh55tf7pp7s4hsvurf4/po... Obviously it's better than nothing, but people are pissed off because the "edited machine translation" workflow leads to poor results, not because of some reflexive anti-AI bias or whatever.
Was the workflow MT -> human translation?
If so thats honestly such a lazy followthru given the technical hurdles overcome wrt the font tech
Afaik japanese media (manga) abuse alot the use of puns on its language due to the amount of homonyms on it.
The Dreamcast still got played post-PS2 purchase, but not much - fighting games, mostly. PS2's catalog was very, very strong and the combo just dominated.
Non-AI translators had literal decades to step up and do this and didn't so honestly who cares what they think about it.
The Dreamcast wasn't as easy as I can remember.
Not to say that easy piracy is necessarily a death sentence for a console, the DS succeeded in spite of ubiquitous and cheap flashcarts, but the Dreamcast shows it's not necessarily a path to success either. There are just more pertinent reasons for a system to sink or swim.
I owned both. The graphics/games were of similar quality. Having a larger game storage gave the ps2 a decent advantage. The dreamcast seemed more interesting. But the PS2 had a better customer feature set.
The PS2 was popular on its own and it wasn't related to piracy.
I don't understand... what is riding on this?
I have never heard of this game, but based on this blog post I can see why it's a "white whale". It's precisely why I don't think this was a good use of AI at all.
Fan translations have used Babel Fish or similar during the development process for decades. If the final script isn't AI translated I don't see any issue with that.
Screenshots of the translated game do give an impression of edited - or even, at times, unedited - machine translation. What with overly direct word-by-word translations, as well as reasonably obvious references (which the game is chock full of) getting mistranslated as something else entirely. Although those screenshots, of course, are not necessarily representative of the whole script, which was a collaborative effort by many translators.
Given the particular nature of this game, so reliant on inside jokes requiring a knowledge of SEGA history, it's likely an AI translation could miss a lot, and I think the community will eagerly await further real translations done by professional translators leveraging these tools.
Now if we can just get a fan translation of London Seirei Tanteidan (PS1 RPG set in victorian England).
Human translation should obviously be the end-goal, particularly in a text-heavy game from the 32-bit era...but that shouldn't undercut the technical achievement of this hack, even if the MTL text becomes little more than placeholder. Put it all up online, make it easy for someone to pick up the script and translate it independently in chunks, and then insert it back in later. That's how a number of fan-trans were done in the past, if memory serves.
