So glad to hear more people talk about Bookworm. It’s so tempting to try and do what you did and translate the web novel to reach the ending. But JNovel’s translations are too good to not wait for. At least that’s my take.
oh yeah. I adored my experience binge reading until Part 3 at the time. So blissful. Then I waited a whole year until Christmas/my birthday ish where I can take leave from work just to forget life to read all the newly translated volumes hehe. There's just too much added benefit to the translated volumes to spoil it by reading the mtl web novel. All the coloured art, the shot stories 4 panel manga at the end, all the exquisite nuance that I am kinda rabidly searching for the romance lololol I got spoiled (kinda) that there even is a romance with Myne that isn't her age. And then we get more of the love interest and suddenly it felt like a super slooooow burn romance. And MTL would just lose all the subtle hints of it hehehe
Totally feel you, I've been "blue balled" more times that I can remember and it does feel frustrating when it happens, but there's always a payoff and honestly, when the whole series is over, I'll remember that feeling and I know I'll miss it, praise be Myne day
@@Szystedt True enough. I mean, I do have 1 or 2 others I am happy to read weekly while I have the sub anyway. I most likely wouldn't have bothered jumping through the hoops due to their lack of alternate payment options if not for bookworm. Definitely worth it.
Translaters are unsung heros. Not only the profetional, official ones. But also the unoficial fan translators! I'm curently trying to translate the "Akatsuki no Yona" lightnovel into english, using the alredy existing german translation, becouse APARANTLY there is no official english translation yet, and I couldn't find a fan translation, and I just feel sorry for the english fans that they have to miss out on it. Needles to say, that little project gave me a howl new apreciation for translators. Translating one language into another while as good as possible trying to keep the writing style in takt, is really fucking HARD! And soooo exhausting! Translating comics/manga, which are only direct speach, was so much easier in comparisson!
As someone who was born with a physical disability and been bedridden most of their life, I cannot describe how much AscBookworm meant to me when watching it.
As a fellow bookwork addict hearing your experience with trying MTL brought a smile to my lips. I tried it with google translate for 2 chapters and it was BEHYOND HORRIBLE! I tried chat gpt a bit but found it too difficult. But yeah the HOLY MAN AT J-NOVELS I PROSTRATE MYSELF TO THEEE!
I remember when I was reading it live - some things happened and now I'm still stuck at part 4, but I definitely would not replace quof's translation with anything else - it's just written so good and part of the charm was to follow forums after reading new chapters where quof would often explain why he translated something this way or that way. For English speakers, I think he is as irreplacable asset for The Ascendance of a Bookworm as the author herself, and I really hope he will translate the series all to the end... seeing his love for the series though I'm certain we have nothing to worry about :) As for video - it looks like an interesting experiment and... well, it was great as always :D
I've been on the bookworm hype for about 3 years now and every time a new volume is out I'm done with it after 2 days tops and I regularly look for more youtube content about the series and honestly the lack of youtube attention it gets is completely unacceptable.
Yeah the bookworm translator has been on a death march for years now. Major props. I love the series so much I broke down and read the web novel MTL during the first book of part 4. I still look forward to my weekly releases though.
This book series single handedly rekindled my love of reading. This is the logical next step of the addiction and I just havent been willing to take the plunge yet.
I simply refuse to read anything but the official translation, there to much in there that would be lust if just translated directly. And yes it got me reading books again, but... it also ruined fantasy fro me, because after I seen how real worldbuilding is done, 99% of other stories are just pure trash. The way Bookworm shows how the dynamic of the world works, how being Noble is so much more than just having alot of power money. Like in so many ways i feel the Nobles have it worse than the commoners, its like do you want all the food you can eat, or all the freedom you want? PICK ONE! if you picked freedom you better of as commoner.
@@MouseGoat I agree about the nobles having comfort but not freedom. This series has ruined fantasy in general for me as well. The world building is on such a next level that only the giants of fantasy (Jordan, Tolkien, Sanderson etc) are still enjoyable.
"I loved this series so much that I chose to read a butchered almost-literal translation of the source material that removes all of the characterization and prose, and a bunch of references, consistent terminology and interconnections between different volumes, chapters and maybe even paragraphs"
Aw heck yeah! Bookworm represent! I did the same thing as you with Mushoku Tensei, reading the later books was miserable but at least I knew the plot beats. For Bookworm I chose to just ride J-Novel instead of doing it myself. Rather than saying "2 chapters per week" it's more accurate to say "one-eighth of a book every week". Praise be to QUOF!
Bookworm? Bookworm!! I love my favorite Light Novel being covered on a large Channel :) Incidently.. As a native German speaker the names of the gods are sometimes really funny :D
Oh? Please share how they're funny? I know the language and god's are highly influenced by German so I'm curious. Is it as bad as "Water lady" or something like that?
@@zidaryn Another native German speaker here. I wouldn't say it's bad like that. It varies quite a lot, some gods have very straight or literal translations that refer directly to a German term (such as the god of summer "Leidenschaft" means passion), other names seem like a mixture of German terms that can be quite funny in their combination ("Leisegang" = quiet and walk). Even some character names like "Solange" are quite funny, its literal translation is "as long as". But also there aren't always clear ways to translate a term and you need to interpret it, never knowing for sure what the author was inspired by. "Flutrane" is one example for this. Personally I could guess it's combined of two German words but the first one can be debated, maybe "Flut" (flood) or "früh" (early) or a shortened form of "Frühling" (spring) while the second word seems rather clear as "Träne" (tear as in tear drop). But it could also have its origin in totally different German words. You can't be certain without hearing it straight from the author, nonetheless, it's quite amusing to see all those German origins. If you'd like to see more examples, just let me know, I'm happy to share my knowledge and interpretation, some are really funny, not just gods, also character names, regions, towns, animals and many other terms.
@@annjune7338 That's awesome. Seems to me that there's a part of the character that influenced their name. I think I'm good with this. Those examples are enough for me to have ideas on the rest. I'm glad it's not just flat transitions but some metaphors as well.
I have noticed that Japanese LN authors often do neglect to specify who is talking in which particular line, and not all human translators feel the need to add clarification (or they are not sure themselves and decide to just leave it as is). I haven't had this particular problem with Bookworm, which has a very good translation, but it is not rare for a LN to have four or more consecutive lines spoken by different people without any clarification on who is saying what...
The thing is with a lot of Japanese works, is that different characters have different verbal ticks which is how they expect you to tell the difference between who's speaking.
For bookworm quof actually sends a list of clarifying questions to kazuki after finishing the prepub translation of a volume. He has mentioned that in this list he also includes questions about who is actually speaking, this has actually led the english translation including information japanese readers would have no way of getting.
I've noticed this issue in Reincarnated As A Sword. There are a lot of times where they have description of the action, then they throw in about 4 or 5 lines of dialogue (without who is actually speaking what lines.) It makes it so I have to slow down a bunch in those scenes. Which hurts the enjoyment when this should be a high pace fight scene.
I feel the first 5 minutes of this video on a spiritual level. I started reading bookworm when P3V2 came out and it was so difficult to wait for each volume to release. I tried reading the web novel MTL, but it was so difficult to do that I decided to wait. I’ve been reading every week since and it is literally the single best thing about Monday (Myneday) for me. Anyway, read AOB. The anime after season 1 really doesn’t do it justice.
There are a lot of cases where even in the LN translation, certain things are changed that probably shouldn't have been changed. For instance, in part 1 we see Myne writing her name on a slate, and its very clear that the intended spelling of her name is 'Main', but for the sake of the audience understanding how it's supposed to be pronounced, in the LN they went with 'Myne.' Then there's the matter of Shikikoza, where for plot details, it's relevant to note that his name has 4 syllables, yet in the LN translation they shorten it into something that turns out to be a slur, albeit unintentionally.
Iirc quof has stated that while he usually just asks for approval for his name translations, in the case of myne he asked specifically how she wanted it translated without giving her an option he prefered.
Yeah it made sense to me why they spelled her name as Main in the anime. And I have no issue with the idea that a name spelled Main could be pronounced as Myne. Having names where the sounds in them are spelled in ways we're not used to seeing is so common that I rarely think twice about it. Why some people have felt the need to get their panties in a bunch over something that innocuous, that has no affect on the story at all, I never understood.
@@zkeletonz001 That's a great point. I guess I should have clarified that the Myne/Main debacle is one where I have no side other than noting that in-world her name is spelled like the latter, but they went with the former for the sake of people understanding how they want it pronounced. But as for Shikikoza, that's one where I feel it shouldn't have been changed because there was both quite an amusing pun in his name, but in shortening it, Quof accidentally shortened it into something that's quite offensive in a particular context that Myne could fall into depending on how you look at it.
Also regarding people getting into Web Novels, I and many others that I know of have had this experience where we go to read it, despite in some cases (Slime) being very very different from the Light Novel, and believing that it's the Light Novel purely due to the fact that we just do not know much about the difference. So bringing this into the public eye is very much appreciated :D
Looking at literally 2 lines of the MTL that was shown on screen, I immediately recognized the chapters and can definitely feel the weight of that cliffhanger too. I had the same issue and bought the Japanese Light Novel, read all of 3 pages and gave up coz the new week would arrive before I finished page 5. The Merchant Saint is the chapter in question.
This is amusingly timed for me because I just got done using machine translators to make a fan translation for the .Hack//Epitaph of Twilight novels. But I want to be very clear in my process for all of this, because I spent A YEAR working on this project to make it as good a translation as I could manage. So I used a combination of Google Translate and DeepL Translate when working with the Japanese text, but one thing I absolutely DID NOT DO was slap in paragraphs of text at a time and expect the machine algorithms to properly parse through it all at once. Instead, I took the novels sentence by sentence - sometimes even word by word if it felt like the sentence or its structure was being misinterpreted - and carefully re-interpreted what the machines gave me to piece together the proper and intended meaning of the original Japanese. I went through the full novels once, then went through all of it again to build a second draft where I doubled down on re-interpreting and rewording my basic translations to ensure everything flowed well in English, that everything could be understood, and most importantly that I had the full context of the story as I translated it, allowing me to create a more genuine translation of the work. If I ran into phrases or idioms that didn't make sense to me, I made sure to do further research on the origin of them, I looked up any and all information that already existed on the story through the .Hack wiki and other sources to make sure I was being accurate with the translated names of people and places, and I always, always, always double and triple checked my translations if anything sounded off or didn't completely make sense. Every time I see this discussion topic come up regarding machine translations and whether or not its good enough to compete with human translators, it always seems to be on the basis of the PURE machine translation vs what a linguist can do on their own - and the answer they come to every time is that of course the pure machine translation doesn't compare. But in my case I absolutely did not stop at the pure machine translation, I took the machine translation and put as much of my own human language comprehension and writing skill into deciphering the intended meaning of the text, using the machine translations only as a base from which to work off of.
I literally also did this. I literally ran the webnovel of Bookworm through google translate when only up to the beginning of part three was available in English, and I read alllllll the way to the end trying my best to make sense of what Google was telling me they were saying.
Free DeepL will translate 5000 words at a time. So you can paste a block of text at a time and work through that way. My solution was 3 windows open, one with the original text (so I could keep an eye on my place), on with DeepL, and one with google translate. Switching between translations when the going is tough. It vaguely worked, but QuoF is a top bloke in my book, well worth reading his translations even if I got the gist of the story though MTL.
The Main/Myne is the age-old issue of "do you want to the original spelling, or do you want something that sounds the same when said." Because in the original Japanese (and in the local script of the Bookworm world for that matter) she is indeed spelled Main. However, if you say the name out loud in Japanese (or in German, coincidentally), and then ask an English speaker to put what they heard to a page, it will come out as Myne. So in that sense, Crunchyroll is absolutely correct... and so is Quof. It's just a matter of, I guess philosophy or preferance regarding translations.
I get the impression that even a very well translated web novel would still be worse than the LN, because the authors rewrite the story with an editor when they publish to raise the quality to print standards, and they tend to be more experienced and competent writers at that point anyway.
I did this too with some japanese ebooks I bought online from the publisher. I used GPT-4 API and the results were decent. It wasn't consistent with the translation of names between different batches of translations, and sometimes it would repeat a section for no apparent reason. I expect that with the new GPT-4 model, which is cheaper and holds 4x as much context, someone could make a translation bot that remember keys details of the story, and how it spells names to stay consistent. I might give it a go some day if no one else does. But I'm sure in the near future, you could just paste a whole book in and get a whole book out, and then it'd be defunct.
DeepL is a pretty good translator, they often give you a literal meaning (word for word) and a figurative meaning given past sentences context (when set up correctly). What really makes it shine however is it's outstanding support/understanding of japanese slang which you often see in manga, novels, VN's It's commonly used in the VN community with other software which allows it to pull the VN's text, and translate it in real time. It will goof from time to time, however it can be very surprising as a reading given how the translations often come off as very proper/native English.
It works really well, but when I tried to feed longer passages, I noticed it would sometimes insert a random sentence that made absolutely no sense and wasn't in the source text. I don't know why it happens, but it can get annoying. What I ended up doing in my case was making a spreadsheet with both DeepL and Google Translate side by side, and I could comfortably read and understand everything between the two of them.
DeepL often repeats sentences or eats entire paragraphs. just be aware. It's also wrong quite a lot, although more accurate on more occasions than GTL That said, there are times when GTL is more correct than DeepL, and ofc many more times both are wrong. So long as you're aware of this, it's fine, just don't use machine translations with the expectations that they're completely accurate or true simply because they sound like a human wrote it. Too many times I've seen people post a mtl screenshot as some sort of weapon of proof against a real person's translation, when that mtl was completely off
I watched Bookworm on a forbidden site and it switched back and forth from Myne to Main. At first I thought it was correcting Myne to Main based on the way we see her name spelt on her little chalkboard. Those letters did indeed look more like Main than Myne but ofc English speakers already have a different pronounciation of main so Myne makes the most sense.
Translation, especially for literature and similar, is half art and half science. Machine Learning Algorithms (and I agree about it not being AI properly) often lack both. But there is something I do think they could be useful for: "fixing" subtle "errors" in existing translations. Things like disagreements over translation conventions or what a term should be translated to can ruin an experience for some people. But going back and "fixing" these would take a human too much effort, time, and money that they would likely rather spend elsewhere. But an "AI" could reasonably do "find & replace" and any required extra steps with acceptable quality and accuracy. (I put "errors" in quotes because in many cases it is purely a matter of opinion since there is no real right answer since many words don't even have the same connotations in different languages for example.)
0:44 I swear, you hit the nail on its head. I started reading the light novel after the ending of s2 of bookworm last year and had to realize that not everything has been translated yet, while knowing that the web novel has already been finished. I tried to find fan translations or summaries to know how the series continues, but failed. I eventually stoped planning to wait some years for it all to be translated. Its so cool to see that you love the series just as much as i do
ok This remained of this novel called release that witch it was so good that i wanted more of it but the translations were very slow so I actually went to a part time job after class just so I can pay for a translator who will translate the novel for me to read, My friends and family never understood why I was always broke even after working after school.😅😆
Brought to this video after the most recent 5 chapter long pre-pub. I've tried doing MTL a few times before (possibly even from one of the same cliffhangers you decided to go in on, I've been reading the weekly translations for almost a full year now since I lost patience for full volume releases.) Now I'm about to do it again, just because its getting so so good and I know I'll wait a week just for the side stories as we enter the end of the volume, so it'll be two weeks before the main plot continues.
I would also choose a human translator over CHATGPT any day too: because we are a walking contradiction of a species, so trying to digitally replicate human nuance, both linguistically and just in general, to something like CHATGPT/AI is something that I believe is currently impossible due to how much we contridict ourselves as a species
I can relate. I've been hooked on Ascendence since season 1 of the anime. I've been reading the light novel as they come out on BookWalker of which I have been satisfied for the most part. Somehow I have been able to resist the temptation of going to the web novel. But it hasn't been easy.
Shoutout to all of the official translators of course, and the fan translators who work super hard so others can consume content that isn't licensed in our language, usually for free!! Mad respect, they are why I almost never have to turn to mtl
I do rememebr reading shitty PDF file fan translations downloaded from websites with 15 ads disguising themselves as download buttons of some series I enjoyed because it would never get an English translation. The biggest problem is, as always context, in one chapter a character is called one name then in the other the other translator chose another name for them. Or maybe there is some kind of weird japanese phrase no translator can interpret, it all adds to the experience lmao. I am the kind of person who either watches an anime or reads a manga and then gets so anxious for new releases that they immediately spoil the entire series for themselves by reading the entire light novel in like a week while at work. For anyone who is bound to do the same thing as me, go read some english webnovels instead of Japanese ones. Websites like Royal Road have thousands of english speaking authors bursting with creativity just waiting for people to read their stories.
I mean yeah thats everything with ChatGPT it will give you what you ask for but it lacks any intent, will, or "soul" But im like, what did you expect, it dose not know how to "care" for things and we lucky it dose not, becuse once AI starts "careering" we all pretty fucked
I bet it was the "out of time" chapter that make you gave in. Bookworm is meant to simulate how myne felt needing to wait for opportunity for a new book realease
I once read a visual novel/card game thing entirely translated with Deep L You can make it work if you really gotta read/watch/play something But it is a struggle at times glad to see someone else is as crazy as i am
Google translate is kinda useble after some years of experience, you just have to strip down words to their most basic meaning and string them into sentences yourself, it works fine with primitive text like in most web novels.
OMG Quof got a shout out! They have my upmost respect for there dedication regular translations. Great Series, glad to hear your story on trying to get more material on AOBW, I am "patiently" waiting for all the releases XD
Hope it gets more seasons! Also, it seems a lot of LN anime adaptations cut out a lot of the story sadly, though some of the anime manage to be great in spite of that. I need to start reading light novels...
Nature of the beast. Unless it's something mega-popular and guaranteed to be renewed for the next season _forever_ (then you have the opposite problem) you need to put at least a couple volume's worth of the main story into a single season, with webnovels usually written in straight-to-the point style, you don't have much in the way of description or exposition to be replaced by the visuals, so you basically trying to cram ~12 hours of read-aloud story into 12 20-minute episodes :(
Thing is, the anime ended at a natural end point where the studio could say "go read the light novel" in a gentle way as that part of the story is over. That won't happen again as the rest of the story is extremely interconnected. So if the studio wants to make a new season it's kinda forced to keep going. There is also another 5 volumes before we get into the major hooks of the series. The first 7 volumes would be maybe 1-2 episodes in a normal isekai. AoB is DENSE and detailed with excellent foreshadowing.
I've been trying to read I'm Being Raised By Villains, and it looks like someone took google translate and just had it try and do every single line, except, the person who did it, probably doesn't understand English at all, because it hardly makes sense. I can get most of what it's trying to say, but it's really confusing and says things that don't make sense quite often. Unfortunately, with comics, they're in image format, so I can't just copy paste the Korean version and try to re-translate it.
Amazing hearing you talk about one of my favourite shows. I fell in love with the world while watching season 1 and luckily s2 was released soon after. :) So excited for its future!
Yeah, I did something similar with a fan translation of a web novel, when I wanted to catch up with the latest, a very confusing experience... though does make me appreciate the fan translator (and now the official translator of the light novel version of the story).
I just started watching ascendance of a bookworm good to know that I’m in for a lot of reading (I’m already very invested and I’m at episode 10 also it’s already setting my shipers heart ablaze and given a clip I’ve seen I’m assuming it doesn’t work out)
@@cloudstrife4534it's probably what they mean, yeah. Since when you put something into AI it's part of the dataset forever, many online content creators are NOT happy about their work being put in.
Ser, we are so close to Part 5 volume 12, as I write this the first chapter will be getting translated next week. I require a review of the whole series.
Eh what I did when I wanted to translate a book and not speaking Japanese was take the Japanese source and the Russian translation which was much much much more complete than the English translation then put them through 2 different translators sentence by sentence then picked the one that made the most sense given the context of the previous sentence and what I already knew about the story, then cleaned it up fixing grammar, syntactical and name errors. Lots of work, honestly I gave it up after 2 chapters.
Her name is マイん in japanese. This translates litteraly to Main. The problem is, that english speakers would pronounce "Main" like main board. So coser to "Mein". To combat this Quof talked to the author and they decided to call her Myne in the LN translation. Meanwhile Crunchyroll ignored that. I'd argue "Main" is a legit translation of her name. But I also com from germany where her name more or less comes from (even though it's the name of a river here) and we'd pronounce it like in english.
I also prefer the official English translation. Having instant excellent translation for free is a dream, but I'm happy that human translation is still valuable.
Can I just say for a moment: *that thumbnail*. Because I spent the entire first three and a half minutes wondering if this was actually about Bookworm, or if you'd picked that particular icon for the video because this was all about introducing (some other) books 'to a different world', as it were. I'm enough behind the official translations of Bookworm that I'm not too worried, but...
The j-novel versions are great they come with the high-res artworks, well worth the price for the vols (not the sub chapters I mean). Though the file sizes are quite big for ebooks.
And knowing how much I'd hate doing this struggle is why I'm not going to do the machine learning thing. I might eventually give in and get J-Novel club, but for now I'm happy with the physical releases.
I've been at the whole GPT translation bit since April and I feel like I finally got to a spot where I can produce decent results but honestly im not sure where I can find a good story that people would actually want to read or a decent site to host the translations on. Any advice?
So with AI and translation I can see AI or machine learning being used to expedite the process. I’m sure more companies will have an AI workflow that raw translates, can be properly fed unique translations, and spits out something that is 90% there. That will make the light novel industry boom in the west.
Man... I've gotten addicted to questionably translated Japanese, Korean, Chinese WNs. It is both frustrating and joyous in varying measures depending on the material.
I'm Chinese and I can't thanks the translator community enough, the entire Bookworm series are tranlated by last year and all translators did the work for free. And the community has an agreement which no one will share bookworm resourses that are not free to read online. Bookworm is my favorite light novel and probably my fav Japanese novel, and I'm buying all the official released books now. I would like to watch a video from you when you finish the books.
the other issue with going to the Web Novel can be that the Web Novel and the Light Novel can be WILDLY different (take "So I'm a Spider, So What" as an example of this)
Hmmmm... Well, fuck. There are a lot of Japan exclusive Pokemon manga that I've always wanted to read, but am unable to because I can't read Japanese. But now this is tempting me to try and give it a shot. Problem is that these manga can be found in image form online, but not text form and I don't know what stuff exists out there that could possibly translate images... >.< These manga are incredibly old and will likely never have an official English translation. So fan translations or letting a machine take care of it may be my only options beyond straight-up learning Japanese. >.
This is why I don't read edited MTL's for the light novels and wait for the official releases. It also feels nicer having the book in person. There are a few webnovel series that I have had to drop on the account they have stopped being translated so I suppose having AI improve on this in the future will not be a bad thing...
Quof... you are a god and your work and your consistency and flair are what makes Bookworm in English be my one book per day, and your translation is Well. Worth. The. Wait. So people, please buy the novels JNC publishes so we support this translator.
I've been through a very similar situation in the past, but my native language is Portuguese, which means there's even less translation, because of this I learned English by myself to be able to read. so i can say i'm just today watched this video because of this same problem.
I love reading books, even the incredibly long series of books. My favorite book series is "Ричард Длинные Руки" by russian writer Гай Юлий Орловский, currently at 56 volumes and not finished yet. But being russian I know - japanese manga, light novels and web novels are surely not for me. The problem is not only lack of translation and not enough interest in translation (seriously, almost nobody wants to translate something from japanese in russian. Even with Pokemon anime we waiting for USA to made american dub, so we could later make russian dub), but also difficult structure of japanese literature - all of those spin-off series, crossovers etc. So, I respect you for going extra mile to read the continuation of the story, and sharing your experience. But I accepted my destiny of staying anime-only till I die. Who knows, maybe some isekai anime I like will eventually get the proper ending.
I want more from this show, it was one of the first Isekai that I saw that took the reincarnation aspect to a different level, putting the person being reincarnated in the body of someone already in that world, and basically replacing that original person. And how they handled that aspect of the plot was fantastic
Actually, according to the author this was a accidental isekai. When she first penned the story she hadn’t known of the genera but took the route she did to explain how Myne knew what she did.
unfortnately seems unlikely we are gonna get more seasons the last third season the director had to fight tooth and nail just to get 10 ep it was orignally only gonna get 8 so yeah really sucks since i love Honzuki so much
I am far too terrified of doing MTL for Ascendance of a Bookworm spoiling the series in a bad way. I might have to for Her Majesty's Swarm (the fifth/final volume does not appear to be translated). I am totally part of the pre-pub group for Bookworm though :)
The way you used ChatGPT is the way I used DeepL and it works pretty well. You can also use the dictionary function for names, and while it's limited in the free version, it was enough to cover a small cast. I've been doing it with the Tari Tari sequel novel and am currently on the final volume. It has been far from perfect, but I've been reading DeepL, Google, and Romanji side by side and it covered pretty much everything... I wish it were easier, but for now it's enough. The goal once I finish reading is to take that MTL and edit it to be a suitable translation to share.
I used DeepL to read ~470 chapters of Kuro no Maou. The translation was not good, it has many problems described in this video. But the story was incredible. Go read Kuro no Maou, people. Even after butchering, it is still a masterpiece.
So glad to hear more people talk about Bookworm. It’s so tempting to try and do what you did and translate the web novel to reach the ending. But JNovel’s translations are too good to not wait for. At least that’s my take.
oh yeah. I adored my experience binge reading until Part 3 at the time. So blissful. Then I waited a whole year until Christmas/my birthday ish where I can take leave from work just to forget life to read all the newly translated volumes hehe. There's just too much added benefit to the translated volumes to spoil it by reading the mtl web novel. All the coloured art, the shot stories 4 panel manga at the end, all the exquisite nuance that I am kinda rabidly searching for the romance lololol I got spoiled (kinda) that there even is a romance with Myne that isn't her age. And then we get more of the love interest and suddenly it felt like a super slooooow burn romance. And MTL would just lose all the subtle hints of it hehehe
Totally feel you, I've been "blue balled" more times that I can remember and it does feel frustrating when it happens, but there's always a payoff and honestly, when the whole series is over, I'll remember that feeling and I know I'll miss it, praise be Myne day
Ahh yes, more bookworm, directly in my veins please. At least 70% of the reason I am paying my j-novel tithe every month.
The joy I experienced from seeing someone use "tithe" was more than I would have imagined prior. Thank you.
100% for me ahahah, still so, so, so worth it!
@@Szystedt True enough. I mean, I do have 1 or 2 others I am happy to read weekly while I have the sub anyway. I most likely wouldn't have bothered jumping through the hoops due to their lack of alternate payment options if not for bookworm. Definitely worth it.
👏
Yes please pay the tithe for our sacred gremlin. Praise the Myne day!
Translaters are unsung heros. Not only the profetional, official ones. But also the unoficial fan translators!
I'm curently trying to translate the "Akatsuki no Yona" lightnovel into english, using the alredy existing german translation, becouse APARANTLY there is no official english translation yet, and I couldn't find a fan translation, and I just feel sorry for the english fans that they have to miss out on it.
Needles to say, that little project gave me a howl new apreciation for translators. Translating one language into another while as good as possible trying to keep the writing style in takt, is really fucking HARD! And soooo exhausting! Translating comics/manga, which are only direct speach, was so much easier in comparisson!
As someone who was born with a physical disability and been bedridden most of their life, I cannot describe how much AscBookworm meant to me when watching it.
👏👏🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗
As a fellow bookwork addict hearing your experience with trying MTL brought a smile to my lips. I tried it with google translate for 2 chapters and it was BEHYOND HORRIBLE! I tried chat gpt a bit but found it too difficult. But yeah the HOLY MAN AT J-NOVELS I PROSTRATE MYSELF TO THEEE!
Praise be to Quof
Thanks be to Quof
I remember when I was reading it live - some things happened and now I'm still stuck at part 4, but I definitely would not replace quof's translation with anything else - it's just written so good and part of the charm was to follow forums after reading new chapters where quof would often explain why he translated something this way or that way. For English speakers, I think he is as irreplacable asset for The Ascendance of a Bookworm as the author herself, and I really hope he will translate the series all to the end... seeing his love for the series though I'm certain we have nothing to worry about :)
As for video - it looks like an interesting experiment and... well, it was great as always :D
I've been on the bookworm hype for about 3 years now and every time a new volume is out I'm done with it after 2 days tops and I regularly look for more youtube content about the series and honestly the lack of youtube attention it gets is completely unacceptable.
Yeah the bookworm translator has been on a death march for years now. Major props. I love the series so much I broke down and read the web novel MTL during the first book of part 4. I still look forward to my weekly releases though.
This book series single handedly rekindled my love of reading. This is the logical next step of the addiction and I just havent been willing to take the plunge yet.
I had the same experience. Before Bookworm, I hadn't read any books for the greater part of 10 years
I simply refuse to read anything but the official translation, there to much in there that would be lust if just translated directly.
And yes it got me reading books again, but... it also ruined fantasy fro me, because after I seen how real worldbuilding is done, 99% of other stories are just pure trash.
The way Bookworm shows how the dynamic of the world works, how being Noble is so much more than just having alot of power money.
Like in so many ways i feel the Nobles have it worse than the commoners, its like do you want all the food you can eat, or all the freedom you want? PICK ONE! if you picked freedom you better of as commoner.
@@MouseGoat I agree about the nobles having comfort but not freedom. This series has ruined fantasy in general for me as well.
The world building is on such a next level that only the giants of fantasy (Jordan, Tolkien, Sanderson etc) are still enjoyable.
"I loved this series so much that I chose to read a butchered almost-literal translation of the source material that removes all of the characterization and prose, and a bunch of references, consistent terminology and interconnections between different volumes, chapters and maybe even paragraphs"
Are you alright?
@@bravado2809 Yeah, thanks for asking though, I appreciate it
Hey, addicts neeeeeed to try get their fix.
Even if some eggs and prose gets broken on the way.
field rice...
Aw heck yeah! Bookworm represent!
I did the same thing as you with Mushoku Tensei, reading the later books was miserable but at least I knew the plot beats. For Bookworm I chose to just ride J-Novel instead of doing it myself. Rather than saying "2 chapters per week" it's more accurate to say "one-eighth of a book every week". Praise be to QUOF!
Bookworm? Bookworm!!
I love my favorite Light Novel being covered on a large Channel :)
Incidently.. As a native German speaker the names of the gods are sometimes really funny :D
Oh? Please share how they're funny? I know the language and god's are highly influenced by German so I'm curious. Is it as bad as "Water lady" or something like that?
always nice to see another german bookworm fan
@@zidaryn Another native German speaker here. I wouldn't say it's bad like that. It varies quite a lot, some gods have very straight or literal translations that refer directly to a German term (such as the god of summer "Leidenschaft" means passion), other names seem like a mixture of German terms that can be quite funny in their combination ("Leisegang" = quiet and walk). Even some character names like "Solange" are quite funny, its literal translation is "as long as".
But also there aren't always clear ways to translate a term and you need to interpret it, never knowing for sure what the author was inspired by. "Flutrane" is one example for this. Personally I could guess it's combined of two German words but the first one can be debated, maybe "Flut" (flood) or "früh" (early) or a shortened form of "Frühling" (spring) while the second word seems rather clear as "Träne" (tear as in tear drop). But it could also have its origin in totally different German words. You can't be certain without hearing it straight from the author, nonetheless, it's quite amusing to see all those German origins.
If you'd like to see more examples, just let me know, I'm happy to share my knowledge and interpretation, some are really funny, not just gods, also character names, regions, towns, animals and many other terms.
@@annjune7338 That's awesome. Seems to me that there's a part of the character that influenced their name.
I think I'm good with this. Those examples are enough for me to have ideas on the rest. I'm glad it's not just flat transitions but some metaphors as well.
@@zidaryn Right, I also think it's quite creative.
I have noticed that Japanese LN authors often do neglect to specify who is talking in which particular line, and not all human translators feel the need to add clarification (or they are not sure themselves and decide to just leave it as is).
I haven't had this particular problem with Bookworm, which has a very good translation, but it is not rare for a LN to have four or more consecutive lines spoken by different people without any clarification on who is saying what...
The thing is with a lot of Japanese works, is that different characters have different verbal ticks which is how they expect you to tell the difference between who's speaking.
@@liamdell6319 Yeah, but if those ticks do not translate to English, I'd expect the translator to compensate for that.
@@MirageGSMI don’t disagree but then you get people complaining about faithfulness to the source material
For bookworm quof actually sends a list of clarifying questions to kazuki after finishing the prepub translation of a volume.
He has mentioned that in this list he also includes questions about who is actually speaking, this has actually led the english translation including information japanese readers would have no way of getting.
I've noticed this issue in Reincarnated As A Sword. There are a lot of times where they have description of the action, then they throw in about 4 or 5 lines of dialogue (without who is actually speaking what lines.) It makes it so I have to slow down a bunch in those scenes. Which hurts the enjoyment when this should be a high pace fight scene.
I feel the first 5 minutes of this video on a spiritual level. I started reading bookworm when P3V2 came out and it was so difficult to wait for each volume to release. I tried reading the web novel MTL, but it was so difficult to do that I decided to wait. I’ve been reading every week since and it is literally the single best thing about Monday (Myneday) for me. Anyway, read AOB. The anime after season 1 really doesn’t do it justice.
I feel you so much. Currrently reading only the translated LN of AOB.
Counting the days for the next volume
There are a lot of cases where even in the LN translation, certain things are changed that probably shouldn't have been changed. For instance, in part 1 we see Myne writing her name on a slate, and its very clear that the intended spelling of her name is 'Main', but for the sake of the audience understanding how it's supposed to be pronounced, in the LN they went with 'Myne.'
Then there's the matter of Shikikoza, where for plot details, it's relevant to note that his name has 4 syllables, yet in the LN translation they shorten it into something that turns out to be a slur, albeit unintentionally.
Iirc quof has stated that while he usually just asks for approval for his name translations, in the case of myne he asked specifically how she wanted it translated without giving her an option he prefered.
Yeah it made sense to me why they spelled her name as Main in the anime. And I have no issue with the idea that a name spelled Main could be pronounced as Myne. Having names where the sounds in them are spelled in ways we're not used to seeing is so common that I rarely think twice about it. Why some people have felt the need to get their panties in a bunch over something that innocuous, that has no affect on the story at all, I never understood.
@@zkeletonz001 That's a great point. I guess I should have clarified that the Myne/Main debacle is one where I have no side other than noting that in-world her name is spelled like the latter, but they went with the former for the sake of people understanding how they want it pronounced.
But as for Shikikoza, that's one where I feel it shouldn't have been changed because there was both quite an amusing pun in his name, but in shortening it, Quof accidentally shortened it into something that's quite offensive in a particular context that Myne could fall into depending on how you look at it.
Also regarding people getting into Web Novels, I and many others that I know of have had this experience where we go to read it, despite in some cases (Slime) being very very different from the Light Novel, and believing that it's the Light Novel purely due to the fact that we just do not know much about the difference.
So bringing this into the public eye is very much appreciated :D
Covering only a fraction of the material in the Anime? I also see Holo and Lawrence waving at us from the next hill with their kid and apprentice.
Looking at literally 2 lines of the MTL that was shown on screen, I immediately recognized the chapters and can definitely feel the weight of that cliffhanger too. I had the same issue and bought the Japanese Light Novel, read all of 3 pages and gave up coz the new week would arrive before I finished page 5.
The Merchant Saint is the chapter in question.
Oh saaaaaaaame Merchant Saint almost broke me too. Lol I’m just busy enough to make it to monday every week
This is amusingly timed for me because I just got done using machine translators to make a fan translation for the .Hack//Epitaph of Twilight novels. But I want to be very clear in my process for all of this, because I spent A YEAR working on this project to make it as good a translation as I could manage.
So I used a combination of Google Translate and DeepL Translate when working with the Japanese text, but one thing I absolutely DID NOT DO was slap in paragraphs of text at a time and expect the machine algorithms to properly parse through it all at once. Instead, I took the novels sentence by sentence - sometimes even word by word if it felt like the sentence or its structure was being misinterpreted - and carefully re-interpreted what the machines gave me to piece together the proper and intended meaning of the original Japanese.
I went through the full novels once, then went through all of it again to build a second draft where I doubled down on re-interpreting and rewording my basic translations to ensure everything flowed well in English, that everything could be understood, and most importantly that I had the full context of the story as I translated it, allowing me to create a more genuine translation of the work.
If I ran into phrases or idioms that didn't make sense to me, I made sure to do further research on the origin of them, I looked up any and all information that already existed on the story through the .Hack wiki and other sources to make sure I was being accurate with the translated names of people and places, and I always, always, always double and triple checked my translations if anything sounded off or didn't completely make sense.
Every time I see this discussion topic come up regarding machine translations and whether or not its good enough to compete with human translators, it always seems to be on the basis of the PURE machine translation vs what a linguist can do on their own - and the answer they come to every time is that of course the pure machine translation doesn't compare. But in my case I absolutely did not stop at the pure machine translation, I took the machine translation and put as much of my own human language comprehension and writing skill into deciphering the intended meaning of the text, using the machine translations only as a base from which to work off of.
I literally also did this. I literally ran the webnovel of Bookworm through google translate when only up to the beginning of part three was available in English, and I read alllllll the way to the end trying my best to make sense of what Google was telling me they were saying.
Same
I did that too, and then a year later I did it again. Don't ask me why.
Raimund needs to debug his translation magic circles.
Free DeepL will translate 5000 words at a time. So you can paste a block of text at a time and work through that way. My solution was 3 windows open, one with the original text (so I could keep an eye on my place), on with DeepL, and one with google translate. Switching between translations when the going is tough.
It vaguely worked, but QuoF is a top bloke in my book, well worth reading his translations even if I got the gist of the story though MTL.
The Main/Myne is the age-old issue of "do you want to the original spelling, or do you want something that sounds the same when said."
Because in the original Japanese (and in the local script of the Bookworm world for that matter) she is indeed spelled Main.
However, if you say the name out loud in Japanese (or in German, coincidentally), and then ask an English speaker to put what they heard to a page, it will come out as Myne.
So in that sense, Crunchyroll is absolutely correct... and so is Quof. It's just a matter of, I guess philosophy or preferance regarding translations.
I get the impression that even a very well translated web novel would still be worse than the LN, because the authors rewrite the story with an editor when they publish to raise the quality to print standards, and they tend to be more experienced and competent writers at that point anyway.
I did this too with some japanese ebooks I bought online from the publisher. I used GPT-4 API and the results were decent. It wasn't consistent with the translation of names between different batches of translations, and sometimes it would repeat a section for no apparent reason.
I expect that with the new GPT-4 model, which is cheaper and holds 4x as much context, someone could make a translation bot that remember keys details of the story, and how it spells names to stay consistent. I might give it a go some day if no one else does. But I'm sure in the near future, you could just paste a whole book in and get a whole book out, and then it'd be defunct.
DeepL is a pretty good translator, they often give you a literal meaning (word for word) and a figurative meaning given past sentences context (when set up correctly).
What really makes it shine however is it's outstanding support/understanding of japanese slang which you often see in manga, novels, VN's
It's commonly used in the VN community with other software which allows it to pull the VN's text, and translate it in real time. It will goof from time to time, however it can be very surprising as a reading given how the translations often come off as very proper/native English.
It works really well, but when I tried to feed longer passages, I noticed it would sometimes insert a random sentence that made absolutely no sense and wasn't in the source text. I don't know why it happens, but it can get annoying.
What I ended up doing in my case was making a spreadsheet with both DeepL and Google Translate side by side, and I could comfortably read and understand everything between the two of them.
DeepL often repeats sentences or eats entire paragraphs. just be aware. It's also wrong quite a lot, although more accurate on more occasions than GTL That said, there are times when GTL is more correct than DeepL, and ofc many more times both are wrong.
So long as you're aware of this, it's fine, just don't use machine translations with the expectations that they're completely accurate or true simply because they sound like a human wrote it. Too many times I've seen people post a mtl screenshot as some sort of weapon of proof against a real person's translation, when that mtl was completely off
@@heerotomoe yeah, I've noticed it struggles with multi line dialogue and repeats itself constantly
I watched Bookworm on a forbidden site and it switched back and forth from Myne to Main. At first I thought it was correcting Myne to Main based on the way we see her name spelt on her little chalkboard. Those letters did indeed look more like Main than Myne but ofc English speakers already have a different pronounciation of main so Myne makes the most sense.
I have been thinking this for a time, but Myne Monday is good enough
I am stealing this, Myne Mondays have been a staple for me for about a year now
Translation, especially for literature and similar, is half art and half science. Machine Learning Algorithms (and I agree about it not being AI properly) often lack both. But there is something I do think they could be useful for: "fixing" subtle "errors" in existing translations. Things like disagreements over translation conventions or what a term should be translated to can ruin an experience for some people. But going back and "fixing" these would take a human too much effort, time, and money that they would likely rather spend elsewhere. But an "AI" could reasonably do "find & replace" and any required extra steps with acceptable quality and accuracy. (I put "errors" in quotes because in many cases it is purely a matter of opinion since there is no real right answer since many words don't even have the same connotations in different languages for example.)
0:44 I swear, you hit the nail on its head. I started reading the light novel after the ending of s2 of bookworm last year and had to realize that not everything has been translated yet, while knowing that the web novel has already been finished. I tried to find fan translations or summaries to know how the series continues, but failed. I eventually stoped planning to wait some years for it all to be translated. Its so cool to see that you love the series just as much as i do
"Rice-paddy" "answering machine" - if you know you know.
ok This remained of this novel called release that witch it was so good that i wanted more of it but the translations were very slow so I actually went to a part time job after class just so I can pay for a translator who will translate the novel for me to read, My friends and family never understood why I was always broke even after working after school.😅😆
Brought to this video after the most recent 5 chapter long pre-pub. I've tried doing MTL a few times before (possibly even from one of the same cliffhangers you decided to go in on, I've been reading the weekly translations for almost a full year now since I lost patience for full volume releases.) Now I'm about to do it again, just because its getting so so good and I know I'll wait a week just for the side stories as we enter the end of the volume, so it'll be two weeks before the main plot continues.
I was thinking about getting a job translating mangas. I’m fluent in both Japanese and English.
This makes me curious about how well DeepL's paid version would work since its more suited to these purposes
I would also choose a human translator over CHATGPT any day too: because we are a walking contradiction of a species, so trying to digitally replicate human nuance, both linguistically and just in general, to something like CHATGPT/AI is something that I believe is currently impossible due to how much we contridict ourselves as a species
3 more days until Myne-day
Always looking forward to them Mondays
I can relate. I've been hooked on Ascendence since season 1 of the anime. I've been reading the light novel as they come out on BookWalker of which I have been satisfied for the most part. Somehow I have been able to resist the temptation of going to the web novel. But it hasn't been easy.
Shoutout to all of the official translators of course, and the fan translators who work super hard so others can consume content that isn't licensed in our language, usually for free!! Mad respect, they are why I almost never have to turn to mtl
I do rememebr reading shitty PDF file fan translations downloaded from websites with 15 ads disguising themselves as download buttons of some series I enjoyed because it would never get an English translation. The biggest problem is, as always context, in one chapter a character is called one name then in the other the other translator chose another name for them. Or maybe there is some kind of weird japanese phrase no translator can interpret, it all adds to the experience lmao. I am the kind of person who either watches an anime or reads a manga and then gets so anxious for new releases that they immediately spoil the entire series for themselves by reading the entire light novel in like a week while at work.
For anyone who is bound to do the same thing as me, go read some english webnovels instead of Japanese ones. Websites like Royal Road have thousands of english speaking authors bursting with creativity just waiting for people to read their stories.
"THe MTL will never be able to talk to the author and clarify things" *flashbacks to the great renaming bedate*
I mean yeah thats everything with ChatGPT it will give you what you ask for but it lacks any intent, will, or "soul"
But im like, what did you expect, it dose not know how to "care" for things and we lucky it dose not, becuse once AI starts "careering" we all pretty fucked
I bet it was the "out of time" chapter that make you gave in. Bookworm is meant to simulate how myne felt needing to wait for opportunity for a new book realease
I once read a visual novel/card game thing entirely translated with Deep L
You can make it work if you really gotta read/watch/play something
But it is a struggle at times
glad to see someone else is as crazy as i am
Google translate is kinda useble after some years of experience, you just have to strip down words to their most basic meaning and string them into sentences yourself, it works fine with primitive text like in most web novels.
I had to purposely spoil myself on some key events just to keep myself from going down the MTL rabbithole
OMG Quof got a shout out! They have my upmost respect for there dedication regular translations. Great Series, glad to hear your story on trying to get more material on AOBW, I am "patiently" waiting for all the releases XD
Hope it gets more seasons!
Also, it seems a lot of LN anime adaptations cut out a lot of the story sadly, though some of the anime manage to be great in spite of that.
I need to start reading light novels...
Nature of the beast. Unless it's something mega-popular and guaranteed to be renewed for the next season _forever_ (then you have the opposite problem) you need to put at least a couple volume's worth of the main story into a single season, with webnovels usually written in straight-to-the point style, you don't have much in the way of description or exposition to be replaced by the visuals, so you basically trying to cram ~12 hours of read-aloud story into 12 20-minute episodes :(
Thing is, the anime ended at a natural end point where the studio could say "go read the light novel" in a gentle way as that part of the story is over. That won't happen again as the rest of the story is extremely interconnected. So if the studio wants to make a new season it's kinda forced to keep going. There is also another 5 volumes before we get into the major hooks of the series. The first 7 volumes would be maybe 1-2 episodes in a normal isekai.
AoB is DENSE and detailed with excellent foreshadowing.
I've been trying to read I'm Being Raised By Villains, and it looks like someone took google translate and just had it try and do every single line, except, the person who did it, probably doesn't understand English at all, because it hardly makes sense. I can get most of what it's trying to say, but it's really confusing and says things that don't make sense quite often. Unfortunately, with comics, they're in image format, so I can't just copy paste the Korean version and try to re-translate it.
Amazing hearing you talk about one of my favourite shows. I fell in love with the world while watching season 1 and luckily s2 was released soon after. :) So excited for its future!
Yeah, I did something similar with a fan translation of a web novel, when I wanted to catch up with the latest, a very confusing experience... though does make me appreciate the fan translator (and now the official translator of the light novel version of the story).
I just used Chrome's auto translate feature, and it seemed to work quite well.
I really hope we see a continuation of the anime at some point.
I just started watching ascendance of a bookworm good to know that I’m in for a lot of reading (I’m already very invested and I’m at episode 10 also it’s already setting my shipers heart ablaze and given a clip I’ve seen I’m assuming it doesn’t work out)
And controversy in 3… 2… 1..
Do you mean Arc getting controversy for this?
@@cloudstrife4534it's probably what they mean, yeah. Since when you put something into AI it's part of the dataset forever, many online content creators are NOT happy about their work being put in.
@@thoopsyThat does makes sense why people would be unhappy about that. Thanks for letting me know!
Ser, we are so close to Part 5 volume 12, as I write this the first chapter will be getting translated next week. I require a review of the whole series.
Eh what I did when I wanted to translate a book and not speaking Japanese was take the Japanese source and the Russian translation which was much much much more complete than the English translation then put them through 2 different translators sentence by sentence then picked the one that made the most sense given the context of the previous sentence and what I already knew about the story, then cleaned it up fixing grammar, syntactical and name errors. Lots of work, honestly I gave it up after 2 chapters.
Her name is マイん in japanese. This translates litteraly to Main. The problem is, that english speakers would pronounce "Main" like main board. So coser to "Mein". To combat this Quof talked to the author and they decided to call her Myne in the LN translation. Meanwhile Crunchyroll ignored that. I'd argue "Main" is a legit translation of her name. But I also com from germany where her name more or less comes from (even though it's the name of a river here) and we'd pronounce it like in english.
I also prefer the official English translation. Having instant excellent translation for free is a dream, but I'm happy that human translation is still valuable.
Wago 221 is the best patron name so far
Cause I can´t wait, I read the whole series from start to finish. Then I start again. Send help I´m stuck in an endless Loop😱
Can I just say for a moment: *that thumbnail*. Because I spent the entire first three and a half minutes wondering if this was actually about Bookworm, or if you'd picked that particular icon for the video because this was all about introducing (some other) books 'to a different world', as it were.
I'm enough behind the official translations of Bookworm that I'm not too worried, but...
The j-novel versions are great they come with the high-res artworks, well worth the price for the vols (not the sub chapters I mean). Though the file sizes are quite big for ebooks.
I'm part of the Pre-pub gang, but after last Monday, I'm 5 seconds away from looking into the WN.
And knowing how much I'd hate doing this struggle is why I'm not going to do the machine learning thing. I might eventually give in and get J-Novel club, but for now I'm happy with the physical releases.
I've been at the whole GPT translation bit since April and I feel like I finally got to a spot where I can produce decent results but honestly im not sure where I can find a good story that people would actually want to read or a decent site to host the translations on. Any advice?
Thank you for sacrificing your patience for this information.
So with AI and translation I can see AI or machine learning being used to expedite the process. I’m sure more companies will have an AI workflow that raw translates, can be properly fed unique translations, and spits out something that is 90% there. That will make the light novel industry boom in the west.
I used Google Translate to translate Bookworm before the Anime was announced. It was totally worth it IMO.
meanwhile Google Translate turned "Jedi" as in the guys from Star Wars into "Jew" uuuuuuhhhhhhh..............
Man... I've gotten addicted to questionably translated Japanese, Korean, Chinese WNs. It is both frustrating and joyous in varying measures depending on the material.
There should be fan translation of anime, Machine translation is still limited.
didn't know about any of this so it was fun to learn
Laughs in prepub, cries in waiting a week between releases
I'm Chinese and I can't thanks the translator community enough, the entire Bookworm series are tranlated by last year and all translators did the work for free. And the community has an agreement which no one will share bookworm resourses that are not free to read online. Bookworm is my favorite light novel and probably my fav Japanese novel, and I'm buying all the official released books now. I would like to watch a video from you when you finish the books.
I appreciate that you didn't spoil anything!
I've used this, but with local LLMs in oobabooga... worked wonders since you have a lot more control.
Not 100% but I would say 85% in Honzuki
Muehehehe if a series deserves it, it’s bookworm
You know what, this is sparking my interest in actually reading the LN cus I loved bookworm
Just wanna let you all know that Wit studio is continuing the anime lez goo
the other issue with going to the Web Novel can be that the Web Novel and the Light Novel can be WILDLY different
(take "So I'm a Spider, So What" as an example of this)
Bookworm is so good! I love the light novels and recommend them often.
Which chapter or cliffhanger was what got you to break and go to the web novel?
Hmmmm... Well, fuck. There are a lot of Japan exclusive Pokemon manga that I've always wanted to read, but am unable to because I can't read Japanese. But now this is tempting me to try and give it a shot. Problem is that these manga can be found in image form online, but not text form and I don't know what stuff exists out there that could possibly translate images... >.<
These manga are incredibly old and will likely never have an official English translation. So fan translations or letting a machine take care of it may be my only options beyond straight-up learning Japanese. >.
there has been a few research publications on this topic, and ChatGPT and BingChat are way better than Google Translate or Papago
This is why I don't read edited MTL's for the light novels and wait for the official releases. It also feels nicer having the book in person.
There are a few webnovel series that I have had to drop on the account they have stopped being translated so I suppose having AI improve on this in the future will not be a bad thing...
Quof... you are a god and your work and your consistency and flair are what makes Bookworm in English be my one book per day, and your translation is Well. Worth. The. Wait.
So people, please buy the novels JNC publishes so we support this translator.
edge auto translate is actually really good
ALL MTL Readers see their selves in this man!
I'm with you on the whole not actually AI thing.
I've been through a very similar situation in the past, but my native language is Portuguese, which means there's even less translation, because of this I learned English by myself to be able to read. so i can say i'm just today watched this video because of this same problem.
I love reading books, even the incredibly long series of books. My favorite book series is "Ричард Длинные Руки" by russian writer Гай Юлий Орловский, currently at 56 volumes and not finished yet. But being russian I know - japanese manga, light novels and web novels are surely not for me. The problem is not only lack of translation and not enough interest in translation (seriously, almost nobody wants to translate something from japanese in russian. Even with Pokemon anime we waiting for USA to made american dub, so we could later make russian dub), but also difficult structure of japanese literature - all of those spin-off series, crossovers etc.
So, I respect you for going extra mile to read the continuation of the story, and sharing your experience. But I accepted my destiny of staying anime-only till I die. Who knows, maybe some isekai anime I like will eventually get the proper ending.
I want more from this show, it was one of the first Isekai that I saw that took the reincarnation aspect to a different level, putting the person being reincarnated in the body of someone already in that world, and basically replacing that original person. And how they handled that aspect of the plot was fantastic
Actually, according to the author this was a accidental isekai. When she first penned the story she hadn’t known of the genera but took the route she did to explain how Myne knew what she did.
unfortnately seems unlikely we are gonna get more seasons the last third season the director had to fight tooth and nail just to get 10 ep it was orignally only gonna get 8 so yeah really sucks since i love Honzuki so much
I am far too terrified of doing MTL for Ascendance of a Bookworm spoiling the series in a bad way. I might have to for Her Majesty's Swarm (the fifth/final volume does not appear to be translated). I am totally part of the pre-pub group for Bookworm though :)
A "learn japanese with this amazing app" sponsor would've been PERFECT for this video lol
chatGPT is gpt 3.5 Bing chat is gpt4.
The way you used ChatGPT is the way I used DeepL and it works pretty well. You can also use the dictionary function for names, and while it's limited in the free version, it was enough to cover a small cast.
I've been doing it with the Tari Tari sequel novel and am currently on the final volume. It has been far from perfect, but I've been reading DeepL, Google, and Romanji side by side and it covered pretty much everything... I wish it were easier, but for now it's enough. The goal once I finish reading is to take that MTL and edit it to be a suitable translation to share.
ONE OF US!!! ONE OF US!!! ONE OF US!!!
I used DeepL to read ~470 chapters of Kuro no Maou. The translation was not good, it has many problems described in this video. But the story was incredible. Go read Kuro no Maou, people. Even after butchering, it is still a masterpiece.
I'd pay good money for a translated "Humanity has Declined". *sigh*