{"id":29244,"date":"2024-04-02T15:49:34","date_gmt":"2024-04-02T06:49:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/?p=29244"},"modified":"2024-04-02T15:49:35","modified_gmt":"2024-04-02T06:49:35","slug":"new-manga-platform-stirs-controversy-with-botched-machine-translations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/news\/new-manga-platform-stirs-controversy-with-botched-machine-translations\/","title":{"rendered":"New manga platform stirs controversy with botched machine translations\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Japanese publisher To Books announced the launch of the English version of their digital manga hosting platform <strong>CORONA EX<\/strong> on April 1. Following the announcement, it was pointed out by users that the platform boasts \u201cAI-powered translations,\u201d and examples of botched Japanese to English translations quickly stirred up a lot of dissatisfaction among manga enthusiasts and professional translators.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">[Not an April Fools Day Joke]<br><br>TO Books (JPN publisher of Bookworm, Tearmoon Empire, etc.) announced they are releasing a new digital manga reading platform for English readers<br><br>\u2022 They confirmed Google AI is being used for translation on the most recent chapters of their titles,\u2026 <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/KiC2WVX2zE\">pic.twitter.com\/KiC2WVX2zE<\/a><\/p>&mdash; \ud83e\uddedMangaAlerts #uw7s\ud83c\udf0a (@MangaAlerts) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/MangaAlerts\/status\/1774828518951600569?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 1, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Corona Ex is a Japanese manga hosting platform that launched back in 2022. For the platform\u2019s second anniversary, To Books revealed its English version, aimed at delivering To Books titles to global readerships. According to the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.to-corona-ex.com\/about\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">official homepage<\/a>, Corona Ex will provide overseas readers with manga translated by To Books&#8217;s publishing partners as well as manga translated using Google\u2019s AI. The publishers caution users that \u201cthere may be errors\u201d in the machine translations and note that \u201cbonus content\u201d such as afterwords of manga will not be available on the platform.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u201ctem\u0113\u201d (used to address someone in a rough manner) is simply transcribed as \u201ctemee.\u201d Even more shocking is that parts of text written in non-standard fonts are left entirely in Japanese.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Wanted to check out how bad this was for myself. Thankfully one of the series proudly translated by Google has a chapter available for free. Let&#39;s see how it&#8211; Oh. Okay.<br><br>Yeah they didn&#39;t even have someone post-MTL edit this, it&#39;s just raw output. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/AdJRWzOzM1\">https:\/\/t.co\/AdJRWzOzM1<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/4jsUbioelP\">pic.twitter.com\/4jsUbioelP<\/a><\/p>&mdash; Andrew &#39;Steiner&#39; Hodgson (@DistantValhalla) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/DistantValhalla\/status\/1774837457931948471?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 1, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>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.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The digital manga platform Corona Ex is charging $4.5 a month for manga translated by Google AI, which has caused a lot of anger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":29247,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_gspb_post_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,65],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-29244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-nongaming-news","tag-japan-related-news"],"blocksy_meta":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - 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