Cyntiashare - Why you shouldn't support her
Full post is available here. In this post I'll only go through the most important stuff.
Cyntiashare is known in the community mainly for two things:
1) Stealing Drama CD translations;
2) Selling AI translations without proofreading and without informing clients about it.
She's also known for many more things like: pretending to be a victim, exaggerating the situation, being manipulative with people who are nice to her and saying bad stuff behind people's backs instead of confronting them. I won't be going into this much detail here, if you want to read my whole essay with all screenshots, please go to my site linked at the top of this post.
Most of the things I'll be talking about in this post is stuff that might not be bad for every person but is pretty bad behavior in this community. Please be aware of this.
Stealing Drama CD translations
Cyntiashare is known for copying other people's translations and pasting them on her site, before its deletion, and now into PDFs that are available on her closed Google Drive only for members of her community.
Translators not only didn't agree for copying their raw translations, some of them even messaged Cyntia to stop doing this. It's especially weird move if you consider that their translations are available publicly on the Internet and these translators ares still acive in the community. Saying that it's "for archivization purposes" doesn't work here.
Obviously it's important to say that Cyntia does write who made particular translation... On the first page of PDF in font size 12 with two big watermarks with her name. All pages of her PDFs with translations not made by her are filled with big watermarks with HER name. She also sometimes don't even provide links to the source.
I'll quote my own post:
As other translators said, there’s difference between you putting credit and you getting permission to copy something.
Do you think that piracy isn’t stealing because you credit the label and don’t claim that audio was created by you?
I'm wondering all this time, why? For what reason?
Why not make compilation with links to Drama CD translations? What's the reason for someone to waste their time to copy all of the translations? I get that you can be scared of site's going down but in that case why not create your own private archive and share it only when translation vanishes? So many questions but no one to answer.
This is the topic that infuriates me the most. Cyntia sells her Drama CD translations for money without informing anyone (or even lying) that ALL of her translations are made by 100% AI without any human proofreading.
I've made whole essay about why AI usage for translations is good, but why it's bad if you not only manipulate people, you also do not use your own brain to fix AI mistakes. But if you want to read it, again, go look at the full post.
Cyntia never admitted publicly that all of her translations were made by machine translator and never even were read by her, but I've proven it myself and my proof is, at least for me, enough to say that what I'm saying here is A FACT.
Okay but what do I mean by the "she manipulates people". Well, she often writes on her translations that they were made by two people (her and her friend). I believe that it's manipulative because when reading this you assume that, well, someone did fix clearly visible mistakes. But nope. It's all AI, no proofreading. Translation doesn't make any sense.
You can even look at my own translations where I also use machine translator to help myself, but they don't look as bad as this. There's no way that two people with eyes and brain looked at it and said "yeah, looks good, easily understandable".
I also didn't put this argument in my initial post but now since I've started translating Drama CDs myself I can say that it's also weird that there are no timestamps at all in any translation. I also don't put timestamps with all my translations but still...
Here above you is a screenshot where she's admitting to using AI (again nothing wrong with that) but only doing it in private message with someone.
And maybe you don't know but altough she does share some of her translations for free, most of them are behind paywall and you need to pay for each translation either 2 or 4USD. But then she has the nerve to say that all tipping is optional. But well, if you don't tip, no translation for you I guess.
This is the end of the most important stuff. In full post on my site I also talk about her interaction with me, her pretending to be a victim, how she treats her friends, her paid membership, her not supporting Drama CD industry even though she earns money from it... There's also PDF she written with obviously her watermark on the whole two pages with where she works and why she doesn't have time for anything (but she still copies people translations, I guess for something like this there's always time). Ah and I also talk there about the fact that in the end she does nothing for the community. So many more topics.
I've initially made this post in December 2024/January 2025, but I don't want for the time to bury this topic under the ground. I feel like spreading awareness is important, especially because there are people that paid for these translations and are not happy with them.