New manga platform stirs controversy with botched machine translations
Japanese publisher To Books announced the launch of the English version of their digital manga hosting platform CORONA EX on April 1. Following the announcement, it was pointed out by users that the platform boasts “AI-powered translations,” and examples of botched Japanese to English translations quickly stirred up a lot of dissatisfaction among manga enthusiasts and professional translators.
Corona Ex is a Japanese manga hosting platform that launched back in 2022. For the platform’s second anniversary, To Books revealed its English version, aimed at delivering To Books titles to global readerships. According to the official homepage, Corona Ex will provide overseas readers with manga translated by To Books’s publishing partners as well as manga translated using Google’s AI. The publishers caution users that “there may be errors” in the machine translations and note that “bonus content” such as afterwords of manga will not be available on the platform.
Furthermore, Corona Ex will be subscription-based, with a monthly fee of $4.50/month, which puts it significantly above platforms such as Viz Media ($1.99/month) or Shonen Jump ($2.99/month). Meanwhile, based on the chapters available for free on Corona Ex, users have pointed out that the machine translated manga appears to have not gone through any checks or revisions by human editors.
Apart from sentences being unnatural and disjointed, there also appear to be grave errors such as whole phrases in Japanese being left untranslated. As seen in the post below, the Japanese second-person pronoun “temē” (used to address someone in a rough manner) is simply transcribed as “temee.” Even more shocking is that parts of text written in non-standard fonts are left entirely in Japanese.
While machine translation of artistic media is controversial in its own, Corona Ex has further fueled anger by providing their translations seemingly without human supervision and at a relatively steep price point.
Amber V
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With AI translations they need a human editor behind them to ensure it is readable preferably someone with history working on manuscripts, as for Google that was a very bad idea to begin with as Google is not what I would call a good program, I would have tried to license something from Deepl a Neural Machine Translation program instead.
AI translations actively hurts their business but will push for it anyway if it means they won’t have to give pocket change to actual people.