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by lajamerr 1477 days ago
That makes significantly more sense.

This is what human translators came up with.

"I was a thirty-four-year-old man with no job and nowhere to live. I was a nice guy, but I was on the heavy side, didn't have good looks going for me, and was in the midst of regretting my entire life. I'd only been homeless for about three hours. Before that, I'd been the classic, stereotypical, long-time shut-in who wasn't doing anything with his life. And then, all of a sudden, my parents died. Being the shut-in that I was, I obviously didn't attend the funeral, or the family gathering thereafter. It was quite the scene when they kicked me out of the house afterward."

So the DeepL one seems more close. Though the Human writers do take some liberties and not entirely 1:1 accurate.

1 comments

Not knowing Japanese and just having seen the translations posted here, I'm inclined to trust the machine ones more. "No fixed address" seems to be more accurate than "nowhere to live". Not sure if the first two sentences should be past tense. Again, unsure about "homeless" and 住所不定 appears to be a catchphrase which should always translate to the same thing. The vibe I get from machine translations is it refers to the sort of people who live around in capsule hotels etc.

Of course, I could be totally wrong. But I couldn't know. I'm a big consumer of machine translated text (with the purpose of understanding the information contained) and I do feel like it's game over for casual human translations. Usually, with a tiny bit of effort (some googling) you can figure out the ambiguous parts. If I need help I'd rather just ask about a specific word, phrase or ask a general question about the text. Human translators veer too far off the original trying to produce "proper" text in the target language, which usually destroys information. Machine translations fail in a more obvious way.

For the context, this paragraph is the beginning of Mushoku Tensei [1], a popular light novel series. (That's why there are human translators for this otherwise obscure bit of text!) I haven't exactly read it, but the subsequent text [2] suggests that the protagonist got expelled from his family and indeed became homeless. The machine translator might lack this exact context but ideally could still recognize that just having no fixed address here wouldn't fit the mood.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushoku_Tensei

[2] https://ncode.syosetu.com/n9669bk/1/ (it's a norm for recent light novel series to be serialized in free web sites and then get published)