I spoke of this a few days ago on Tumblr, but it merits mention here: I recently attempted to post on r/otomegames regarding the human-translated Angelique patch - I'd discussed the project on the subreddit previously, and some folks had asked for an update - but my post was removed, labeled as "self-promotion." I messaged the mods for clarification, as my previous discussions hadn't run afoul of this problem and no such rule was evidently being enforced against the AI patch, but received no response.
I don't know if there's been a rule change or if some mod has an odd interpretation of the rules or if someone's just an AI hardliner, but the upshot is that updates on the patch project are likely not going to be forthcoming on that subreddit. I've been posting updates under the "translation project" tag on my Tumblr, so that's the best place for the latest info. I'd also recommend that if you're following any human-powered translation, coding, or patch projects on that subreddit (as it was, previously, a magnet for that activity), follow the creators instead on their social media or blog, or reach out and ask if there's another venue where they're providing updates - just in case they're encountering this resistance as well.
Now, I see there's a bit of a conversation going on with several other untranslated games with human translations in progress having low-effort, straight-from-AI patches released for them. I wanted to wait until my own project was done to comment, but given there is a lot of talk currently, I'll add my own experience. This ran a bit long, so I'll put it under a cut.
First, the release of the AI patch is a headache - it puts a bigger time crunch on our project in order to contain the damage it does to the franchise in the West by presenting it poorly with a problem translation that doesn't showcase what made the game special. (As I've noted before, a former team member experimented without my knowledge in using AI on the script translation. The results obliterated the differences between the characters and were at times borderline incoherent. The Angelique script by nature does not take well to AI.) I will note, though, that no one behind the AI patch is acting in an unexpected manner. I don't expect the folks behind the low-effort AI patches to understand the problems behind their approach (I'll get to why in a moment).
For me, though, what took me aback was the instant shutting out from certain quarters upon the release of the AI patch. The otome games subreddit was one of them; another was a previously-friendly party who upon learning the news concluded instantly that as this translation was from a computer, it was therefore obviously the One Ultimate Correct Translation and better than anything a human could produce, particularly one whose talents lay with words and not coding.
I want to emphasize: we had a very warm, welcoming, and supportive response from many quarters after the AI patch news, which I deeply, deeply appreciate and for which I have the utmost gratitude. The kind voices far outnumbered the negative ones. I will say, though: the freezeout from those who turned out to be big AI supporters was instantaneous, absolute, and drop-dead cold. I am aware, of course, that many folks are enthusiastic advocates of AI implementation whenever possible. I wasn't aware of how little tolerance, and how much hostility, some of these folks have for anything that's not AI, and how aggressive they will be in trying to discourage or outright prevent you from following any other path.
Now, I am stubborn and have the confidence of a successful career in my chosen field behind me. I can totally see, however, less-experienced translators, coders, and artists wilting when confronted with this hostility. It is a wall - a need to convince you that you have nothing to contribute, expressed by cutting you off from further consideration or larger conversations, sometimes by folks you might have counted as friends before. Again: this isn't, by any means, something that's coming from everybody - just a select few. I'm not seeing it discussed, though, and it's a type of targeted, absolute rejection with which I don't think many of the folks in the gaming hobby project space have much experience. I can see some of them, particularly those fueled by positive external feedback instead of personal satisfaction, taking it like a knife.
(Addendum: There's also a secondary source of aggressive discouragement from those who aren't AI partisans but who themselves have been discouraged from pursuing personal projects by AI. Again, it's the outward component of the emotion, and the sheer relentlessness, that alarms me here; despair and resignation usually withdraw inward, but there's instead this bizarre won't-be-ignored anger, a conviction that if they've surrendered, you should, too - you must, you will, by whatever means necessary, a Shiori-from-Utena way of dealing with pain and failure through determination to make sure everyone else suffers, too. I absolutely haven't experienced elsewhere, and it can be disconcerting to downright frightening to encounter.)
Second is a quick observation: I see discussion of how human patch projects need to head off AI translations by beating them to the punch. This isn't a failsafe given the time investment involved in making a quality product and testing your work, particularly when the alternative is just telling Claude to repackage autotranslation content and calling it a "patch." The parties who don't care about quality are always going to win the speed race - and when they run out of untranslated titles, they'll go for AI versions of already-translated scripts (which will be marketed as superior to the human efforts by the One Ultimate Correct Translation partisans). Competing AI patches are something with which the community and any human-powered project is just going to have to deal from now on.
(Please note that I'm not insensitive to the issue of the time involved in creating human-powered, tested patches and how some folks just want to play these games now. However, as I said on Tumblr: if you want to play an AI-translated Angelique, you've had that option for years through the host of programs that will automatically translate ROM text windows. The folks behind the AI patches do not have any skills that you, dear reader, do not already possess. An AI patch is not adding any value.)
Third is a shorter version of a post I want to write when this is all over, but a lot of...all this is an outgrowth of something I'm going to call the Third-Year Language Student Problem. (I owe the French teacher I had in my own third year for identifying it.) By the end of their second year, a language student has basically enough vocabulary and grammar to get the basics of a language, follow rudimentary conversations, etc. - enough to trick the novice into thinking that they have a complete, all-encompassing, fluent command of the language. They absolutely don't. They only start to get that in their third year, because what they start to study at that point, and what they've been missing up till then, is nuance and expressiveness - emotion, connotation, etc. This is especially true for a language so far removed on the language tree as Japanese is from English - where the mechanisms for expressing emotion and nuance are often markedly different, to the point where the novice might claim they don't exist. (This is how you get all the "Japanese has no means of expressing emotion!!! You have to add in the emotion in English, the superior language" assertions on social media: a lot of novices whose knowledge pool is still shallow sharing opinions with unwarranted confidence.)So you have these people who have studied a little Japanese but believe they have a complete command of the language - enough to edit a long and complex script, identify mistranslations and elided nuance & context, etc. in a single day. They're not remotely qualified enough to do that - but they think they are, because they now have an understanding of the basics and can't envision the language consisting of more than that. It's a Dunning-Kruger problem, essentially.
In a way, I'm loathe to discourage what from a certain angle can be considered ignorant moxie, as you do need a certain amount of moxie to tackle big projects in the first place (or did, when that required effort and not just asking the computer to do it and not caring about the result). I was near my third year when I started translating the Phantasy Star Compendium. Before, though, the third-years would, with experience and out of necessity, get better, just by encountering stuff they didn't understand and having to get over those hurdles. The third-year students relying on AI, though, will never get better, because they'll never realize anything is wrong - they just look unquestioningly to the machine to be right, believing it will always be there and considering it an automagic box that always gives the One Correct Answer, and not a probability engine that relies on context to make educated guesses, an approach that can and will frequently fail and is not as good for translating human emotions as a human mind with full context of a work and character.
The damnable thing here is that the genres that are most susceptible to the AI patch people - the dating genre and visual novels, which are text-heavy and often overlooked for fan translations due to their target audiences - are the ones that are least amenable to it, as their appeal rests on nuanced characterizations and emotional scripts that can be communicated effectively only through a skilled translation. Likewise, the folks who would put together AI patches for these games - the third-year language students (if you're lucky) who think they know enough to translate and edit but can't identify the nuance the AI isn't getting and frequently don't have the writing skill to make good edits or translations themselves - are the one least equipped to do so.
That's more than I planned to say, and I could say even more. That'll do for starters, though. My (unwilling) experience with AI and Angelique is that makes such a hash of the script that I'm skeptical of the language abilities and judgment of anyone who would deem the result acceptable, and regardless of the very bizarre reaction from a minority, I refuse to abandon something I love to no-talent script kiddies.
