It's figuratively bloody @deadbonesgrow - Tumblr Blog

quiltinginspo

“Cherry Blossom Spring” and “Evening Showers” by Helene Knott

pisces-core

nietspad

kingdomheartstwo-deactivated201

foxville-deactivated20210128

Ahh ok so I know this is an artblog and I never reblog anything, but I had to chime in!

So the whole white glove thing comes from early black & white animation, most notably the Mickey Mouse shorts, but also the Looney Tunes and the Max Fleischer toons. The gloves serve two purposes:

One; the gloves are big and makes those over-the-top hand gestures more prominent. It allows the characters to be more expressive, which is necessary for some of the mute cartoons.

Secondly, these characters tend to be completely black, like Felix the Cat (who was one of the inspirations for Mickey). The black color is easier to animate, but you end up with a problem: if their hands were over their bodies or a dark background, you wouldn’t see them! In Mickey’s first appearance in Steamboat Willie, Mickey and Pete don’t have their gloves, and everything kind of bleeds together.

Adding the gloves in the later shorts, you can see the distinction between his body and hands. Problem solved!

Even after technicolor cartoons arrived, the gloves stuck.

Apparently, Bugs Bunny didn’t wear gloves for a bit after the color cartoons came, but audiences asked why he stopped wearing them so the animators changed it back.

fndungeonmom

I FEEL AS THOUGH A HUGE PART OF MY CHILDHOOD HAS BEEN UNTANGLED!!!

spaceisart

stenchkow

Reminder that capitalism is the death of art

deepseametro

are you whiny bitches seriously acting like faster and more affordable and more accessible translation is bad? it’s a bad thing? it’s a thing we should be against now? is that seriously where we’ve arrived? can you people think for ten fucking seconds just ONCE?

machine translation is really good for many languages - esp the romance ones - and while its not perfect or anything, like.. i don’t know how to tell you it’s a good thing we’re able to instantly speak to people, 80% accurately, from anywhere in the world

theothersarshi

I went through the notes on this post specifically to find this reply - or one like it. Because it has a point, and it’s a decent point for you, the person. But it’s also missing the info of the larger scale problem.

(Or it isn’t; as you rightly point out in the tags, it’s a capitalism problem. But I’ll expand on this point of “capitalism”. I need to rant. I need to scream.)

I’m a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. I’ve worked in translation proper, I’ve worked on editing other people’s work, I’ve led a couple of translator teams. I’ve worked the occasional miracle, working around some Really Dumb Choices the developers made.

(Spoiler alert: other languages have different syntax and grammar, if you give me a list of nouns to translate, and then give me the plural “s” to translate separately, this is not good. Even in English, woman -> womans is dumb.)

I am a fan of making things affordable and accessible. I am really happy that Google Translate and similar things can tell me the gist of what people are saying in conversations I only half care about. As the poster above says, it’s great! Not perfect, but ok!

Do you know what’s not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?

The client the original image is talking about isn’t you. It’s not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client they’re talking about is, essentially, the corporation: the translation agency, the publishing house, the IT giant.

You, the individual, do not have the power to demand how I do my job. If you come to me and say, “Sarshi, I want you to take this 300-word post, run it through Google Translate, and then charge me half of what you usually do for translating it”, I can take it or leave it.

But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. “We have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!” “We have support articles, Sarshi! We’re paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!”

You say it’s ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like “lol, this works”, too!

It’s happening over and over. And these aren’t… they’re not people, you know? They’re not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. They’re agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, “gosh, we said we’d do it for cheap, how can we manage that?”

Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, you’ve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldn’t work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to “cut costs” by screwing over every contractor you have? Great. Just great.

This is going to screw you over - you, the individual. Not my client, not the translator’s client in general - the company’s client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the company’s only metric is if you buy it or not. And the company makes decisions based on what brings the most money for the least cost.

So your hardware manuals might be crap and you might be in tears because you have no idea how to make your new appliance do the thing. You’ll go on YouTube and you’ll find a solution, and you’ll eventually figure it out. And maybe you’ll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still won’t get a good translator, because they already have a cheaper solution that seems to work.

So your game looks like it was translated by a bunch of rats in a bunker and you can barely understand what anyone’s saying? Well, maybe they got a bottom-feeding agency overpromise that they totally have legit translators working for $1/hour. Pinky swear! Did you buy the game? You did. So… the system worked! They’ll hire the same agency again!

It’s like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but it’s cheaper not to. They’re doing us a service by selling us shoes that won’t last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - they’re cheap, aren’t they? They’re affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Who’s counting!)

And meanwhile, it’s easy to forget things might be different. That we have the ability to create good things, pleasant things. That manuals can be easily readable, that games can sound great, that books can be awesome to read. It becomes harder to trust the market, harder to believe in quality, easier to say that this is normal, this is how things just are.

And if you speak English natively, well… You’re at a huge advantage. A lot of stuff is created by your people, for you. For countries like mine, that are small enough to import a lot, nearly everything is translated. I want you to imagine almost all movies subbed, every appliance made elsewhere (with menus needing translated and all), every app in a foreign language. And everybody who can cut costs will try to.

It’s not… it’s not great.

repinipi

#excellent breakdown #i promise no translator worth anything is against individual people being able to use mt to understand texts and communicate #i’m a translator and i’m a big fan of machine translation in my everyday life but it should not be used commercially #machine translation in commercial products is at worst a health and safety risk #but NOBODY who actually understands the matter is saying that mt shouldn’t exist. for fuck’s sake

via @nailgun-nali

consistantly-changing

[Image description: a tweet by @lauren_wilford “Lauren Wilford” which says “a YouTube comment about the way Al destroyed the field of translation years ago”. Attached is a screenshot of a YouTube comment by Caroline Kloppert, which says “I spent decades of my life learning foreign languages, only to see the translation industry destroyed by Al. The inferiority of the machine translations a few years back did not stop the destruction of the industry. The machine translation cost nothing, and so the price for all translation came crashing down, because the bottom feeders used machine translation. I found myself paid half price to ‘just edit’ (as if it was less work) a translation done by machine which was basically unintelligible so that I had to go back to the original and translate it myself. Most clients, the bottom of the pyramid that kept the industry going, did not care about the quality of the translation. If we expect that clients prizing human made products will save industries we are being very delusional…. the vast majority of clients will go for the process that costs less.”]

themainspoon

If you’ve ever attempted to translate literally anything you should know how fucking hard that shit is.

I’ve brought up the time I translated a manga chapter for a small group of people after the mangadex purge scared the main translator away. It was a small little Manga chapter that was like 12 pages long, and it was not easy. It isn’t just porting over what the text literally says, you also have to make it readable. I remember one sentance in particular, I remember looking at the literal translation and trying to work out how to actually make it read like something a real human would actually say.

There’s also the issue of changing expressions and possibly also cultural references that your audience won’t understand to something they will. Like knowing to translate “猫に小判” as something like “Pearls before Swine” instead of literally translating it as “giving small ovular gold coins used in the Edo period to a cat”, so on and so forth. Lastly, what is “cool”, or “tough”, or “funny”, or “sexy”, or whatever else can differ a lot between languages, you can’t expect something to continue to read that way when you translate it, you’ve got to get creative to make sure the original intent comes across, even if it means not translating it literally.

All this shit is really hard, all this shit requires a lot of critical thought, all this shit requires a human who is realises that translation is often also a process of adaptation.