[Anonyneko]

Amazing technical achievement, and also a very unfortunate situation with the reliance on AI translation. I'm not privy to the details of the actual translation process (whether AI translation was really just a technical placeholder or actually the draft for the real translation), but the criticism online has been scathing.

[eltondegeneres]

The article says "Something important that should be clarified before we move on is that machine translation (specifically a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5) was used during the initial hacking phase for testing purposes. Once it was time to translate the game proper, multiple human translators then took over."

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.

[Anonyneko]

This statement still, unfortunately, doesn't clarify whether the final translation was MTPE (machine translation post-editing) or translated from scratch by humans. I'm not a professional translator, but according to those of them I've seen on Bsky and the likes, MTPE greatly hurts both the translation quality and, ironically, the translation speed. It also makes it easier to accidentally recruit translators who don't have a decent enough grasp of the source language.

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.

[Tiktaalik]

Yes the real achievement here I think is the creation and public sharing of the translation tools. The AI translation here should be considered effectively a proof of concept of the tools.

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.

[Anonyneko]

I hope so... but in the fan translation world the first translation is almost always the only translation, and the only one most people will experience even in the exceedingly rare case of an alternate translation coming into existence (as only the first one ever makes the news).