ML Examples

 Here are a couple simple examples from that light novel I partially translated last year.

The first one completely trips up the AIs.  For the second one, I was more just curious about how they'd each handle yoroshiku.

Line 1:
『隆之介……あ、違った。と、殿村くん、い、いませるか』 　いませるか？　いますか、いませんか、が混ざったのか？

Google Translate: "Ryunosuke... oh, that's wrong. Tonomura-kun, can you, can you come now?" Can you come now? Did he mix up "Are you there?" and "Are you there?"
DeepL: Ryunosuke... Oh, wrong. Tonomura-kun, are you here? Are you here? Is that a mix of “are you here?” and “are you not here?”
ChatGPT: “Takayunosuke—oh, no, I mean, Tonomura-kun, a-are you here?” She tripped over her words at the end, blending here or not into a strange jumble.

ChatGPT completely broke here, it seems like.  Misreading the very easy name and then turning the second line into something that makes no sense in the context of what the previous line it wrote was?  Either way, the weird wording joke completely broke all the machine translation tools.  None of them are able to handle it.

For my translation, I went with: “Ryuunosuke...ah, no, I mean, To-tonomura, is you there?” Is you there? Did she mix up “is he there?” and “are you there?”

Since it keeps the absurdity of the slipup, while still sounding like a believable English slipup.

Line 2:

これから一年間よろしく、と周囲から聞こえるけど、今さら幼馴染相手に気取る必要もないだろう。

Google Translate: I hear people around me wishing me the best for the coming year, but there's no need to act pretentious towards a childhood friend at this point.

Deepl: I hear people around me saying, “Let's have a good year together,” but there's no need to put on airs with my childhood friend now.

ChatGPT: I could hear people around me saying, “Here’s to the year ahead,” but there was no need to put on airs with a childhood friend at this point.

All of them sound a bit awkward, especially with the "act pretentious" or "put on airs" parts. Neither of those would normally be used in a casual scene like this. I'd replace that with "act so formal," I would say. Other than that, ChatGPT probably sounds the most natural, which fits my experience. Yoroshiku is just so hard to translate without sounding strange.

Dawson