Comment by debugnik
8 hours ago
I've got some heavy reader friends and they keep complaining that many of Spains's fantasy book translations are ridiculously bad and blatantly machine translated now: Senseless terms that require looking up the original to understand, e.g. "fall" translated as in falling when it meant autumn; proper nouns, including character names, sometimes translated sometimes not; and many sentences that mix up the grammatical gender because the machine wasn't given enough context to infer it.
But these publishers don't get punished because they keep licensing popular foreign franchises, which aren't quite fungible, so consumers don't want to miss out and thus don't vote with their wallets.
How is it possible? Even if you just put text to ChatGPT it'll translate it much better than that. And with actually decent harness, the translation should be quite good. Do they even save on tokens by choosing cheapest model or something?
It's impressive how bad it is even for machine translation, I've seen examples. You're imagining them using a good LLM and a decent harness, but I'd bet it looks more like an intern copy-pasting snippets through an LLM or even just Google Translate and cleaning it a bit.
They DO vote with their wallets, though. They're still buying that crap, don't they?
Unfortunately the answer is no. Reading or just owning a book by a certain author can be a matter of fashion or prestige. That allows for really bad work still be published.
If it's just for prestige, they should buy the original (English?) version and get even more prestige.
Sometimes the drop in sales is less than the cost savings