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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14598 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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Wait, so what was the process there? Was ChatGPT given the Japanese text and asked to generate its own translation for comparison, or asked to improve/iterate on his? In general, I agree with your critique of non-native speakers using AI for text massaging (the feeling of something not quite coherent being said in superficially polished prose by an AI broadcast announcer voice with occasionally inappropriate diction is pretty grating), but in this particular case, it seems to me that the AI translation is in fact superior and somewhat more true to the original, which may be because unlike in the "Indians making slop for Tiktok/Youtube shorts" case, it had access to a literate source text. Specifically, for example, there is in fact nothing to the effect of "I could die there" in the JP text. The author must have spontaneously come up with it while writing his own proposed translation.

In general, the text we are looking at is close to a pessimal case for both AI translation and translation by someone who learned formulaic English at school, because the original is dense with subculture references and memes that are not just invoked as keywords but determine the syntax and narrative form as well. It's like trying to translate a 4chan greentext, or a doge image.

I think he must have tried to iterate on his original translation. The direct translation is more accurate:

Today’s stream was perfect! When I commented, “Step on me, please!” my oshi, Haachama, actually responded with “You’re gross!” And then she even followed up with “You’re way too much of a perv!” It was insane!! I feel like I’m in sexy heaven right now. This is honestly the most peaceful moment of my life.

And the thing I’m most hyped for is Haachama’s birthday live on Sunday, August 10th at 9PM!! I seriously want to support her with everything I’ve got. Just imagining that day feels like I’m drinking her bathwater.

Though I agree with @phailyoor that a lot of self-expression is lost here compared to his original attempted translation.

When you told me you're fluent in Japanese the other day, this was really not how I expected it to become relevant haha.

First thought: 'Oh, hey, I can understand this!'

Second thought: 'Oh, Christ, I can understand this.'

I'm not fluent yet but the point where I could watch degenelate videos like this and just understand them fine kind of ruined my life.

degenelate

1/10 for political correctness
9/10 for humorous value

Right, this translation gets closer to the original in some ways by not reproducing the additions and deletions in the original proposal, but also loses some of the colour. Notably, none of the three translations really quite reproduces the heroin-addled vibe of the original (this was perfect, I am in a state of absolute bliss, I took a dose, and then I got another dose!! and soon I'll get yet another dose, I can't wait!!). I wonder if this sort of pathology has been thoroughly RLHFed out of ChatGPT, or one could elicit it with the right prompt.

(The "sexy heaven" thing in yours came from a typo @phailyoor introduced - it's 天国にいる気分 on paper, not the enigmatic 天国に色気分 for which that interpretation would be a fair guess.)

oops I should have double checked for typos.

今、天国に色気分だわ

@4bpp sorry for double-dipping, but since I've got you here do you know why わ is used? Obviously it's usually feminine, and I understand that the male usage is from the archaic patterns where it's broadly an emphasiser like ぞ and therefore used by archaic / cool characters to express emphasis. Is that what's going on here? It doesn't quite seem to fit.

As a Kansai resident I will say it does not code feminine here, though I can't speak for all of Japan obviously. Men routinely use わ in Kansai dialect, which is in general considered a rougher way of speaking than Kanto ben.

Hmm, thanks. I've seen it come up a number of times from e.g. light novel protagonists, who I would not say are Kansai or cool. @4bpp may be right and it's just memetics that I'm overthinking.

I don't think it codes as overwhelmingly feminine in the way, say, using あたし as a first-person pronoun would, but written out like that it gives the whole phrase a somewhat more pretend/role-playing vibe, so if I really wanted to dig into it I would check if it's an imitation of the speech patterns of the vtuber the author is simping for, or has some other pop-cultural weight behind it. Either way, I don't think this is particularly worth overthinking - people have working mirror neurons, and someone using "y'all" in English or simplifying pronouncing -ing as -in would also not warrant a deep investigation of the implications and whether they have Southern or African-American roots (as opposed to, as per my theory, imitating something they have heard elsewhere).

I didn't spot that tbh. After a decade I still can't quite get all the nuances of how に should be used, especially when it's used as part of more sophisticated/niche grammar structures. N1 is still a little ways off...

I do notice that none of the translations got the nuance of 「キモい！」と反応してくれて right.

Moreover, she said “You’re degenerate!!!” for me.

The use of くれて to imply this was a sort of mutually positive interaction changes the entire tone of the passage, so it's kind of bad GPT misses it. Though I feel like I'm putting far too much thought into the ramblings of a perv on the internet.

Like with your parallel post, I think this is reading too much into a detail. Japanese all but requires having a social directionality suffix when talking about actions done between or on behalf of other people in any remotely polite speech, so just writing ...と反応した, と言った would feel incongruously rude especially in the context of someone gushing about his vtuber idol. To translate it explicitly is to take an unremarkable piece of information that is conveyed by default expectation and elevate it as remarkable - it's as if a Japanese, or English, translator took a German text, where, after the German norm, all occupations must be marked for gender (der Fahrer (the male driver)/die Fahrerin (the female driver) etc.), and took care to translate the markers, turning the neutral "die Busfahrerin hatte einen Unfall" into the potentially sexist "the woman bus driver had an accident". (This would be even worse if you were translating to e.g. Chinese, where not even 3rd-person pronouns are gendered in speech - imagine every he/she turning into a they with an explicit mention of the person's gender!)

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