A large number of English-language localizers are unhappy with Japanese publisher Shogakukan’s decision to use AI translation technology to localize a number of their light novel offerings for international readers.
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Set to launch in North America and Canada sometime near the end of 2024, Shogakukan’s newly-announced light novel app ‘Novelus’ will offer users access to the publisher’s wide library of light novel offerings, including Too Many Losing Heroines!, Shiotaiou No Satou-san Ga Ore Ni Dake Amai, and the Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End prequel novel Frieren the Novel: Prelude.
According to the publisher, Novelus will see more than 400 titles added to its library over the next two years – and in order to meet this ambitious quota, Shogakukan has decided to use the Mantra AI translation engine to help localize their books.
Developed by Japanese tech start-up Mantra Co. for use on manga and webtoons, rather than just providing a literal translation of words like Google Translate or DeepL, the company’s eponymous engine takes story, dialogue, and panel context into account to produce more accurate localizations.
From there, the localization is passed off to human editors within Mantra Co. for a final review before ultimately being passed off to the source material’s publisher.
(Interestingly, despite full documentation regarding Mantra Co.’s localization process being easily accessible, popular anime and manga news accounts such as @MangaAlerts omitted the start-up company’s human element, thus resulting in Western critics near universally misinterpreting this announcement as confirmation that the publisher would only be using machine translation for their app.)
To this end, instead of responding to the impending AI threat by improving the quality of their localizations, a large number of Western-based, Japanese-to-English localizers – many of whom have themselves boasted about having deliberately inserted their own politics and memes into the works they were responsible for – instead focused their energy on raging against Shogakukan’s decision to replace them with AI.
“When there are errors in the front-and-center marketing, I dread to think of what the bulk of it is going to turn out like,” Infinite Dendrogram and Rance X: Showdown localizer Andrew Hodgson proclaimed. “This is what disrespect for the medium and your audience looks like.”
Despite multiple cases where localizer have openly boasted about deliberately and in same cases weaponizing mistranslations, Elden Ring: The Road to the Erdtree letterer Greg Deng went as far as to claim, “This is kind of a minor thing relative to the problem that MTL is inaccurate, but this kind of ‘service’ is also just strictly worse than piracy. Even if you only consider the business side of things, the idea is still flawed.”
“Just this June, Shogakukan announced that it was one of the fund providers for a Tokyo-based A/I/ startup, Mantra, which is focused on the A/I/ translation of JP manga,” stated Last Gender localizer Mishima Kitami. “These companies know manga make money,” “Greed drives them for MORE profits in their pockets, not quality.”
“It is fundamentally unfathomable to me that these corporations think it is acceptable to have stories written by humans to go through MTL,” they added. “MTL – that which cannot grasp the fine details of the words crafted through human endeavor. MTL of human art is a spit in all our faces.”
Issuing a call to arms, the gender inclusive advisor then declared, “I am asking you all, the readers and audiences in the English-speaking sphere who are against A/I & MTL, to drive this Shogakukan app down to rock bottom and into the negatives. Make them regret their decisions to disrespect human art.”
To no surprise, notorious localizer Katrina Leonoudakis – who is most recently and deliberately botched Sentai Filmworks’ English localization of 2.5 Dimensional Seduction – also joined in on the conversation, asserting, “Well, at least they were honest: they only care about cutting costs, not about getting readers good translations.”
“Do you think the authors of the light novels would want their international fans reading garbled versions of the prose they worked so hard on?” she asked. “How disrespectful.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” the Gushing Over Magical Girls localizer emphasized. “Like any tool, machine translation and AI have their uses. But you don’t use a jackhammer to nail a painting to the wall. MT/AI isn’t smart or nuanced enough to craft translations that audiences want to read (and pay for!)”
Instead of sharing her wisdom on Seven Seas English language localization process, Leonoudakis stated “Here’s the thing about light novels: because the original text is often available online (Shosetsuka ni narou! etc.), lots of ‘fan translation groups’ already publish machine translations of them for free online. So… you’re giving international fans what they already have.”
“But these companies don’t care about that,” she continued. “They don’t care about their authors, their customers, or the works they’re ruining with machine translation. In the end, all they care about is 💸money💸.”
“Fortunately, the English manga loc scene is still dedicated to hiring human translators, editors, and letterers to produce high-quality localizations,” she concluded. “And now we’ve got an awards ceremony to recognize the humans that bring authors’ work into English with love and respect!”
As noted above, Shogakukan’s Novelus reader app is set to release sometime before the end of 2024.
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