site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3009 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 10, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Obnoxious issues that arise when you read Chinese Cultivation Novels:

At some point, when the chapter count is well past 4 digits and/or when there's a hiatus, human translators (usually unpaid fans) can drop out, and you run into MTL (machine translation).

This might not sound like a problem today, after all, LLMs are pretty good at the job. To test that myself, I've converted chapters from (translated) English to Chinese and back, and find near perfect fidelity.

No, dear reader, the issue is that the MTL can be old. And it's non-trivial to find the original Chinese sources.*

Cue me weeping in agony as the best translation of a favorite novel changes character gender and names every few paragraphs, and translates what was previously "Land of Sin" as "Naughty Land".

Some frankly insane bastards persevere nonetheless, becoming one with the Dao of MTL, and self-reportedly no longer see the broken Mandarin Matrix but grokk the underlying intent. Unfortunately, often at the cost of being unable to process normal English.

Fuck it, I'm going to do dig down the Chinese version and throw it into Google Gemini, a million token-wide context window can't hurt.

*Most places where you can read Xianxia in English use unauthorized or outright pirated translations. And these sites all steal from one another, so if a bad translation becomes the default, good luck finding a better one.

Some frankly insane bastards persevere nonetheless, becoming one with the Dao of MTL, and self-reportedly no longer see the broken Mandarin Matrix but grokk the underlying intent. Unfortunately, often at the cost of being unable to process normal English.

Betcha Claude can grok the underlying intent and create a less-borked translation too, and any damage to its sanity would be isolated to only that chat. Care to provide a sample?

I've actually spent about 4 hours yesterday using Gemini 1206 to translate as I go, the 2 million token CW meant I can throw in dozens of chapters and have it produce perfectly pleasant text. There are a few stylistic quirks, or perhaps they were the original translator's quirks that aren't present anymore. It certainly doesn't garble gender and do anything too funky.

I'm sure Claude would be great at the task, but even the original GPT-4 would consider it trivial.

Here's the site I've been grabbing the raw text from if you want to take a look: https://www.piaotia.com/html/7/7095/6107291.html

The horrid "official" translation can be found on:

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2771.html

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2771.html

Can you give us a small sample of the better translation for comparison?

https://novelfull.com/forty-millenniums-of-cultivation/chapter-2770-splitting-the-road-with-one-slash.html

That's the bad translation.

Here's a better one on pastebin:

https://pastebin.com/b4R2hWF7

The most obvious changes are that it very sensibly decides that "Land of Sin" is a better translation than "Naughty Land". A character doesn't mysteriously turn male partway through.

"Manjusaka", a type of plant with connections to the underworld, is a far more contextually and culturally appropriate translation for a location as opposed to "Red Spider Lily".

While a matter of taste, "Covenant Alliance" seems more elegant than "Sanctuary Alliance", and is what human translators initially opted for.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats