Yin Tian Shen Yin Translation Issues

[ActuallySpaceMan42]

Recently, I was hosting this CRT with the issue of MTL coming up: https://vsbattles.com/threads/yin-tian-shen-yin-series-cosmology-upgrade-tier-0.181470/

At the moment, the Yin Tian Shen Yin Series has 5 Novels, 3 of which have been translated on their official license and publisher's site, and 2 others are untranslated.

• https://www.webnovel.com/book/soul-of-searing-steel_9656687306002705
• https://www.webnovel.com/book/above-the-sky_24051807906761905
• https://www.webnovel.com/book/all-heavenly-destiny-reduced-to-ashes_30159008400481205

The first novel in the series, which I had to translate myself, was discussed and accepted at length, with every scan on the profile accompanied by Raws to match. After that, I moved on to Soul of Searing Steel, 2nd Novel in the series, which obviously was much easier, considering I didn't have to do all the work.

The 3rd Novel, Monsters Die If They Are Killed, is where the issues are popping up. While it does have a translated Manhua, it was left unfinished. I used it and the remaining 3 translated novels as a reference when I translated this one. I jotted down every single raw translation and its English variant for every term and character, edited and checked myself.

You can see the full list here.

I further plan to pay a translator and have them verify all the important scans to make sure everything is doubly accurate, and all scans will be accompanied by their Raw Variants. I've done this in the past for other verses (B&W was removed for non-translation-related issues).

Anyway, I just wanted to know where staff stand in regards to this. I'm also aware there's currently a discussion that has yet to reach its conclusion about these kinds of things.

 

[Dark_The_Heroes]

by definition, there can't be any Manhwa Chinese, they have Manhua
Secondly, Manhua was closed after chapter 35.
Thirdly, you didn't mark the topic as requiring translation.

 

[ActuallySpaceMan42]

by definition, there can't be any Manhwa Chinese, they have Manhua

My bad.

Secondly, Manhua was closed after chapter 35.

I stated that.

Thirdly, you didn't mark the topic as requiring translation.

Not sure what you mean, but you need permission to join in a Staff Discussion.

 

[Dark_The_Heroes]

I meant. Shouldn't this topic have a special tag according to the rules? Because the topic only has the name of the universe, and it's unlikely that anyone will notice it.
P. S. I won't write anything else to avoid disturbing you

 

[Antvasima]

@ActuallySpaceMan42

If you are fluent in Chinese, we are in great need of translation helpers.

 

[Antvasima]

Also:

@Agnaa @Mr. Bambu @Damage3245

What do you think about this?

 

[Damage3245]

If a non-biased translator is going to go through it and verify it themselves, then I don't have any objections.

 

[ActuallySpaceMan42]

If you are fluent in Chinese, we are in great need of translation helpers.

Sorry, the only person fluent in my family is my mother, and she's too busy for this.

 

[Zaratthustra]

As I’ve mentioned in previous discussions about MTL series, I personally have no issue with machine-translated or self-translated works - as long as the translations are cleaned up and made readable by a human. What’s most important is that the translated text is accompanied by the original raw text (in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or even languages like Romanian if I for example were to add a series from my country...nothing interesting found yet but still searching), so that readers can verify the accuracy for themselves.

In the case of Chinese novels specifically, it's incredibly easy to confirm the legitimacy of a translation. If you have the original title in Chinese characters and the chapter number, it takes less than two minutes to search the raw text online. There are multiple websites that host these works for free - copyright? what's that?. Anyway, that's makes it simple to check if a quote or scan is fake, poorly translated, or taken out of context.

Basically have these 3 requirements:

• The translated text
• The raw/original text
• The chapter number

…I see no reason to reject MTL or self-translated content.

At the end of the day, this kind of transparency allows others users to easily check the quotes/statements/etc, and decide for themselves if its okay. Sincerely, in many cases, fan translations (even if MTL) offer content that would otherwise be inaccessible and most important (in my opinion) its usually better than at least 60% of the "official" translation websites (Qidian/Webnovel i'm looking at you) as they uses google translations or bad machine translated chapters that are not verified at all. I've read in the last 2 years more MTL novels than "official" translations and most were of higher quality.

I will post an example to show how easy it is - I'll use the novel in question (Monsters Die When They Are Killed - 怪物被杀就会死).

Paste the title of the novel - 怪物被杀就会死 - into google and you'll see multiple websites (including the original Qidian website where the novel is/was posted).​

​

Scroll a bit down and you'll find a website named Shuba (which I usually use to get the raw text for what I read). Open the link I posted if you don't want to go through the process, or just scroll a bit after searching the title.​

​

Open the website, and if you have auto-translation enabled on your browser, it will automatically change to your prefered language (English in my case), and on that page, you'll see the chapters, summary, author, words count, etc. You can easily click on any chapter to fully open it with the Chinese raw text, so you can verify or read at will.​

Anyway, my opinion didn't change in the last 2 years or so since the first thread on MTL was published.

Edit: @ActuallySpaceMan42, the links: (You can see the full list here.) and the one for the locked thread don't work.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

OP looks reasonable to me from a glance.

 

[Agnaa]

Why was this thread closed?

According to the first sentence, it's about the usage of MTL, but then the rest of the OP only talked about non-MTL stuff (official translations, and fan translations that presumably aren't MTL).

Damage said that it should be fine if a translator goes through and verifies it.

Zaratthustra (while not a thread mod/admin/bureau, and so with no evaluation rights) said that, in general, MTL should be allowed if citations and the raw text are provided. This is against our general standards so I don't give it too much stock.

DDM FRA'd the OP.

So that's just one evaluating staff unconditionally agreeing other than the OP, with Damage providing a conditional agreement whose conditions weren't guaranteed by anyone in the thread.

This needs more discussion before its implemented.

I can't really provide it since I'm confused, this thread claims to be about MTL but doesn't really discuss it, and we have a more general policy thread about the use of MTL which is really where this issue should be tackled, instead of trying to give a single series an exception.

 

[ActuallySpaceMan42]

According to the first sentence, it's about the usage of MTL, but then the rest of the OP only talked about non-MTL stuff (official translations, and fan translations that presumably aren't MTL).

Damage said that it should be fine if a translator goes through and verifies it

I took this as agreement, as I planned on paying a translator to go through the important scans and do just that, which is clarified in the OP.

DDM FRA'd the OP.

I took this as agreement with me doing so.

 

[Agnaa]

I took this as agreement, as I planned on paying a translator to go through the important scans and do just that, which is clarified in the OP.

You present this as something to do in the future, and this thread only happened recently, yet you've continued making cosmology threads for the series.

Have the MTL scans in those been vetted by a translator you paid?

 

[ActuallySpaceMan42]

You present this as something to do in the future, and this thread only happened recently, yet you've continued making cosmology threads for the series.

Have the MTL scans in those been vetted by a translator you paid?

Well, originally this was all going to be in one CRT. But it was too long, and no staff member wanted to review it, so I had to split it into parts.

Anyway, this is going to be covered in the CRT you are in now; nothing has been applied for that very reason. I have about 50$ to use on vetting translations, so I was going to @ all the staff who engaged in this, and previous CRTs to discuss what requires vetting.

 

[Agnaa]

I know from experience commissioning translations that $50 is not going to be enough.

For a human translator, $50 might get you a few pages of text if you're lucky.

I assume the necessary material will be far longer, and this won't be feasible.

Plus, I think it's generally inappropriate to have people evaluating evidence before we verify whether the evidence is even valid in the first place. If we find an issue, we'd need to redo the CRTs. And such minor intricacies of translations can easily sway people's views.

 

[ActuallySpaceMan42]

I know from experience commissioning translations that $50 is not going to be enough.

For a human translator, $50 might get you a few pages of text if you're lucky.

The scans I used in the CRTs aren't that long; a few pages will be fine.

 

[Agnaa]

The scans I used in the CRTs aren't that long; a few pages will be fine.

idk, we generally want context, but maybe.

Also, to clear something up, when you say you "translated these yourself" does that mean that you know Chinese and are translating these from scratch yourself?

If so, is there much point in paying a translator? You'd already be an expert, so we could just have a translation helper like Idiosyncratic check it.

 

[ActuallySpaceMan42]

idk, we generally want context, but maybe.

Yes, this is why I brought up B&W in the OP. It had a lot of staff involved, and in the end, Ultima just listed down all the scans that needed paid translators to double check.

Also, to clear something up, when you say you "translated these yourself" does that mean that you know Chinese and are translating these from scratch yourself?

If so, is there much point in paying a translator? You'd already be an expert, so we could just have a translation helper like Idiosyncratic check it.

I'm not an expert, as I told Ant above.

I just have way too much time on my hands. Everytime I came across a unique name, title, name of an ability, etc, I looked it up in the official translation for the other novels. If it was there, I used it.

All the other bits were MTL, which is why I'm hiring a translator and adding raws to everything.

 

[Agnaa]

I'm not an expert, as I told Ant above.

I just have way too much time on my hands. Everytime I came across a unique name, title, name of an ability, etc, I looked it up in the official translation for the other novels. If it was there, I used it.

All the other bits were MTL, which is why I'm hiring a translator and adding raws to everything.

I think this is an important detail, that should make @Damage3245 and @DarkDragonMedeus reconsider their votes. Did they think you were talking about a series that is completely MTL, where you're going to pay to get some scans translated after the CRTs are concluded?

Especially because of our ongoing staff thread, I don't think we should accept MTL where certain titles were ctrl+f'd for consistency. And if we do so, we should take care to make that decision for the site as a whole.

 

[ActuallySpaceMan42]

Did they think you were talking about a series that is completely MTL, where you're going to pay to get some scans translated after the CRTs are concluded?

I would hope not. The 2nd, 4th, and 5th books are officially translated; the 3rd, which this CRT is about, is the one I had to get involved in since I didn't want to skip an entire book's worth of content.

If it's really an issue, I'm willing to skip the 3rd Book, but I felt it would be more accurate to just use the translated books, to translate the 3rd one, and then get an official translator to go over all the scans used in the CRTs so there won't be any issues down the line.

Especially because of our ongoing staff thread, I don't think we should accept MTL where certain titles were ctrl+f'd for consistency. And if we do so, we should take care to make that decision for the site as a whole.

Yeah, I saw that never got resolved, which is why I linked it at the bottom of the OP.

 

[Agnaa]

I would hope not. The 2nd, 4th, and 5th books are officially translated; the 3rd, which this CRT is about, is the one I had to get involved in since I didn't want to skip an entire book's worth of content.

That official translation has the massive red flag of listing an organisation rather than an individual as the translator/editor. And it seems like people are accusing that organisation of using MTL. So I wouldn't be too confident in that.

Contrast with this and this; official translations of books, who list the individual translators, and which occasionally vary across the length of a long-running series.

 

[ActuallySpaceMan42]

That official translation has the massive red flag of listing an organisation rather than an individual as the translator/editor. And it seems like people are accusing that organisation of using MTL. So I wouldn't be too confident in that.

Yeah, I saw you bring up something similar in the staff thread.

I've found a niche indie RPG. It was originally written in Japanese, but the devs used Google Translate to provide an English release; they've done similar stuff with the lore they display on their website. So, officially-promoted MTL.

If it's the official license holders and publishers who endorse the translation, do we assume they've done an accurate job? It's not like anyone is going to be allowed to re-translate it.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

We need more input from official translators. It slipped my mind that there was MTL done, I thought Actually Spaceman was already aware of the policies and thought he would know better to make sure official human translators take a look at the Raws. But anyway, I am now awaiting to whatever they say then.

 

[ActuallySpaceMan42]

We need more input from official translators. It slipped my mind that there was MTL done, I thought Actually Spaceman was already aware of the policies and thought he would know better to make sure official human translators take a look at the Raws. But anyway, I am now awaiting to whatever they say then.

That's what's being discussed. The OP was about whether I can hire a translator to verify all the scans used through the CRTs, because atm the wiki has a severe shortage of official translators.

Everything else that's not Tiering-related would just be accompanied by scans and raws of those translated scans.

 

[ActuallySpaceMan42]

@Agnaa @DarkDragonMedeus

So, I have the paid translator ready to translate all the quotes used in the CRT. I just need confirmation that if I do this, and everything in the CRTs is proven accurate, that I can move on.

@Vietthai96 @FinePoint

Sorry to bother you two, but what are your opinions on this?

 

[Agnaa]

I'd say so, but that you should release the response the translator provides in its entirety (aside from any parts that would leak your personal details) in a public fashion, so we can verify that they say what you claim they do.

 

[Vietthai96]

Sorry to bother you two, but what are your opinions on this?

I have the same opinion as Agnaa, since this is a very big verse, if you can provide the evidences that human translator are involved (of course without leaking personal information) then well, we can continue

 

[ActuallySpaceMan42]

I'd say so, but that you should release the response the translator provides in its entirety (aside from any parts that would leak your personal details) in a public fashion, so we can verify that they say what you claim they do.

I have the same opinion as Agnaa, since this is a very big verse, if you can provide the evidences that human translator are involved (of without leaking personal information) then well, we can continue

Sure, no issues with that, just need one more vote for this to be finalized.

This will be what's translated; it has all the quotes in order from the different Cosmology CRTs.

 

[Damage3245]

I agree with Agnaa.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

I agree with Agnaa

 

[ActuallySpaceMan42]

Alright, since that's cleared up, I'll close this and continue it on the actual CRT.